The Baltimore Museum of Art. The Cone

Meliza Viquez Salazar

Very Short Introductions are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide. The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. Over the next few years it will grow to a library of around 200 volumes – a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology

The aim of the project is to follow the main line of the development of 20 th century art, the evolution of the form. The form that describes the development of thinking of the society and artists as representative of this society. The main aim of the project is why art of 20 th century chose the way of conceptual perception of the world and reality and went far from the way how it describes items, subjects and human beings. All the tendencies of the 20 th century art have its own attitude towards nature, human and things around human. Art becomes individual and individualism is the main characteristics of art and artist. Artist creates tendencies and he claims that his own perception can be one to express the world. The historical and revolutionary changes of 20 th century including wars, technical development influences art and the form becomes more nervous, scattered and goes far from real description of the world. The world in the paintings of artists of 20 th century is not whole, common, natural unity but this is union of separated items, human beings and result of violent machinery world that was brought by 20 th century. The technological progress that came fast and made greatest influence on human and on the style of life of the humanity was expressed in art too. The perception of the reality in just one decade became very different and this is very fast development. Human body painted by impressionists and human body painted by cubist painter is totally different. It means that way of thinking of the painter changed: painter is new human who lives in the world where human being becomes like background for new machinery world and it is just like toy for the catastrophes that was brought by the war. Artists is new individual that carries responsibility to bring out real values of the society, to keep them, to defend but at the same time to create absolutely new art that is different from old one, that responds to new changes and that describes strives of new human. Before impressionism art develops with logical way; mainly it is built on the logic of development and evolution of the form. The form expresses the point of view and attitude of the painter towards the world. This is one line that begins from European and Italian Renaissance and that lasts till Impressionism. Here the development of the form is connected to the epochal changes, or the form itself reaches perfection and is under self-evolution that of course is caused by the historical, epochal events; the origin of the form is based on the revolutionary points of views or processes.

“Outer-Art” is a movement set up as a protest against, or to ridicule, the random modern art which states that everything is… art! It was initiated by Florentin Smarandache, in 1990s, who ironically called for an upside-down artwork: to do art in a way it is not supposed to be done, i.e. to make art as ugly, as silly, as wrong as possible, and generally as impossible as possible!

From a letter to Émile Bernard Bernard had worked with Gauguin to formulate the style of the PontAven School. He began a correspondence with Cézanne after meeting him at Aix-en-Provence in the spring of 1904, when this letter was written. 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 or, if you prefer, of the spectacle that the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads out before our eyes. 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. M Source: Paul Cézanne: Letters, Ed. John Rewald, Tr. Marguerite Kay (London: Bruno Cassirer, 1946) Everything is framed by the forceful horizontal edges of the table. Each apple has a powerful physical presence as it is built up out of slablike brushstrokes, its form also carefully delineated with a distinct line. The folds of the cloth are equally plastic, their illusionistic tactility reinforced by the concrete presence of parallel bricks of paint. But the picture also has a nervous energy and ethereal flatness: The compote refuses to recede in space because its back lip tips forward. The same is true of the dish. Its edges disappear behind the apples and we have difficulty imagining their connection to each other in space. The tabletop is also spatially disorienting, for it tilts forward and up the canvas rather than moving back into space. The chunks of brushstrokes are obviously flat marks, and they cover the surface with a nervous energy. This energy is epitomized by the strange interior life that the folds of the cloth seem to have. Meanwhile, the wallpaper s leaf pattern momentarily does a reversal as it escapes its twodimensional assignment to take on a three-dimensional life, one as concrete as that of the apples or folds of cloth. Cézanne has abandoned faithfully observed reality to create his own pictorial world, one that adheres to a private aesthetic order and ay I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that PRIMARY SOURCE Paul Cézanne (1839 1906) 26.2 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples in a Bowl. 1879 83. Oil on canvas, 171*8 + 211*4" (43.5 + 54 cm). Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark CHAP TER 26 P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 907 26.3 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibemus Quarry. ca. 1897 1900. Oil on canvas, 251*2 + 311*2" (65.1 + 80 cm). The Baltimore Museum of Art. The Cone Collection, Formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Ette Cone of Baltimore, Maryland. (BMA 1950.196) acknowledges with every move that art is inherently abstract painting is first and foremost about putting paint on canvas to create an arrangement of line and color. Cézanne s art became increasingly abstract in the last ten years of his life, as can be seen in Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibemus Quarry (fig. 26.3), painted from 1897 to 1900. Mont Sainte-Victoire was a favorite motif, almost an obsession, as it appeared in over 60 late paintings and watercolors. The deep vista we saw in the earlier view of the mountain has now been replaced with a more compressed version. The overlapping of representational objects is one of the few devices suggesting depth. Otherwise, the image is an intense network of carefully constructed brushstrokes, lines, and colors that begs to be read as an intricate spaceless tapestry. The foreground trees bleed into the quarry rock, or on the upper right into the sky. The sky in turn melds into the mountain, from which it is distinguished only by the defining line of the summit. No matter how flat and airless, the image, as with any Impressionist picture, paradoxically is also filled with light, space, and movement. Looking at this hermetic picture, we cannot help but feel how the tension and energy of his early romantic pictures were suppressed and channeled into a struggle to create images that balanced his direct observation of nature with his desire to abstract nature s forms. Here is the work of the painter most responsible for freeing the medium from a representational role and giving artists license to invent images that instead adhered to painting s own inherent laws. The Paris gallery DurandRuel began exhibiting the withdrawn, unknown Cézanne in the late 1890s, and in 1907, at his death, he had a retrospective at the avant-garde Salon d Automne exhibition, which had a powerful 908 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D influence on contemporary artists, especially Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as we shall see in the next chapter. Georges Seurat: Seeking Social and Pictorial Harmony Like Cézanne, Georges Seurat (1859 1891) wanted to make Impressionism more like the great art of the past. He studied briefly in 1878 at the École des Beaux-Arts with a follower of Ingres, and after a year of compulsory military service in Brittany returned to Paris, where he spent the rest of his short life. He set up a studio, where he worked intensively in isolation, and in 1884 he unveiled his new style with a large picture called A Bathing Place, Asnières, which depicts a group of laborers swimming in the Seine in a working-class suburb of Paris, not far from where Seurat grew up. The picture, refused at the Salon, was shown in 1884 at the first exhibition of the Independent Artists, a new artists cooperative whose shows were unjuried like those of the Impressionists Artists , Inc. Seurat next participated in what would be the last Impressionist exhibition, in 1886, submitting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (fig. 26.4). The dates of the two shows are significant, for they mark the end of the Impressionist era and the rise of Post-Impressionism. La Grande Jatte s roots in the Realism of Manet and in Monet s Impressionist canvases are obvious, since this is a scene of the middle class taking its Sunday leisure on a sunny, colorfilled afternoon. The painting presents a compendium of types that contemporaries would have easily recognized, such as the courtesan, shown walking a monkey, and the boatman, who is the 26.4 Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. 1884 86. Oil on canvas, 6'10" + 1011*4" (2.08 + 3.08 m). The Art Institute of Chicago. Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. 1926.224 sleeveless man smoking a pipe in the left corner. (Seurat s cataloging of types extends to the dogs in the foreground and boats on the Seine.) Seurat renders his figures as icons, for each is silhouetted in profile, frontally, or in a three-quarter view, following the prescription of the famous Roman architect Vitruvius for the arrangement of sculptural figures on temples. Seurat declared that he wanted to make the moderns file past like figures on Pheidias Panathenaic frieze on the Parthenon, in their essential form. And this was no idle claim. The 6-by-10-foot canvas was meant to function on the scale of great history painting and be seen in the tradition of Poussin and David. Like a history painter, Seurat made detailed studies for every component of his work, even producing a painting of the landscape alone, before the insertion of the figures, and looking like a stage set. Critics noted that Seurat s La Grand Jatte recalls the Classical murals of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824 1898), whose work was so ubiquitous that his fame was widespread by the 1880s. His paintings, such as The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses (fig. 26.5), are set in an idyllic mythical or biblical past where life is serene, bountiful, and carefree. In Puvis s world there is little movement, and INFLUENCE OF PUVIS DE CHAVANNES 26.5 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and Muses. 1884. Oil on canvas, 31*2 + 71*2" (93 + 231 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago. Potter Palmer Collection. 1922.445 CHAP TER 26 P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 909 certainly no exertion. Without appearing geometric, everything is orderly, either vertical or horizontal, with a soothing planarity bringing everything into harmonious alignment. The decorative flatness evokes ancient murals as well as fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Italian frescoes. There is a minimum of detail, endowing the picture with a tranquil and unencumbered look. His figures tend to be silhouetted in profile or frontal, and often have an archaic angularity and simplicity that adds to the aura of primitive purity and innocence. Puvis, who emerged from the academic ranks in the early 1860s, provided a startling Classical alternative to Bouguereau (see page 866), although his classicizing, dreamy images often appealed to the same conservative audience. By the 1880s, they would attract the avant-garde as well, which saw in their visionary world and abstract simplicity the same sanctuary from modern life that they too were trying to attain. SEURAT AND NEO-IMPRESSIONISM As much as Seurat was influenced by Puvis, his agenda could not have been more different, for instead of escaping into a distant past his goal was to create a utopian present, a poetic vision of middle- and workingclass tranquility and leisure. His religion was not just Classicism, but also science. Familiar with the color theory of the American physicist Ogden Rood, he believed that colors were more intense when mixed optically by the viewer s eye rather than on the palette. Consequently, he would build up his paint surface, first laying down a thin layer of a partially mixed local color, over which came a layer of short strokes of related hues, and finally a top layer of equally sized dots of primary and binary color (fig. 26.6). As explained in an 1886 article by Seurat s friend, the art critic Félix Fénéon, this top layer of colors, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina: we have, therefore, not a mixture of material colors (pigments), but a mixture of differently colored rays of light. It does not matter that Seurat misinterpreted Rood and that the claim is not true. Seurat believed his colors were more luminous than the Impressionists , and certainly his technique, which he called Chromoluminarism and scholars later labeled 26.6 Detail of fig. 26.4 910 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 26.7 Georges Seurat, Le Chahut. 1889 90. Oil on canvas, 661*2 + 543*4" (169 + 139 cm). Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, the Netherlands Pointillism or Divisionism, created a uniform, if vibrant, surface that was a kind of systematized Impressionism. Like the figures, the regularized surface of Seurat s pictures seem mechanical, as though the subjective hand eye reaction of the Impressionist has been replaced by a machine capable of recording color and light with uniform dots of paint. In his review of the 1886 Impressionist show, Fénéon labeled Seurat s style Neo-Impressionism the New Impressionism and before the decade was out, it had an army of practitioners who were attracted to its scientific approach, monumentality, and modern look. Many worked well into the twentieth century. As distinctive as the technique is, it would be a mistake to emphasize it at the expense of the meaning of the art. Seurat was a socialist sympathizer and was dedicated to creating a utopia of middleand working-class tranquility and leisure. His socialist vision of a harmonious, perfect world and belief in science as the force to make this happen characterize his method. Seurat s experimental approach led him to the theories of French psychophysiologist Charles Henry as outlined in his treatise A Scientific Aesthetic (1885). Henry claimed that colors, as well as lines, carried specific emotional meaning (e.g., yellow or a 26.27 Auguste Rodin, Burghers of Calais. 1884 89. Bronze, 6'101*2" + 7'11" + 6'6" (2.1 + 2.4 + 2 m). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, ashington, D.C. Gift of oseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. 66.4340 his interest in the psychic toll exacted on the individual by civilization. Whether he is exploring the crushing effects of war or the emotional costs of creative effort, Rodin emphasizes the psychological consequences of modern life. His ability to convey intense psychological states through forms at once familiar and abstract confirms his kinship with Symbolism. It was the hidden, inner struggle that Rodin, the Symbolists, and the nascent science of psychology sought to understand and render visible. ART NOUVEAU AND THE SEARCH FOR MODERN DESIGN In 1895, a German entrepreneur, Siegfried Bing, opened a decorative-arts shop called La Maison de l Art Nouveau (The House of New Art) in Paris. Bing had made a fortune importing Japanese art and furnishings, and now sought to promote the Japanese principle of total design: Every detail of an interior space should be integrated into a single style. Aiming to eliminate any distinction between the fine and decorative arts, he hired famous architects, artists, and designers to develop every detail of entire rooms for his shop, as well as to design individual products, including furniture, vases, tiles, and stained-glass windows. This new style was called Art Nouveau, after Bing s shop. Elsewhere in Europe it took on different names, such as the Jugendstil (Youth Style) in Germany and the Secession Style in Vienna. Though varying somewhat from one country to the next, the style, which is particular to architecture and the decorative arts, is usually characterized by abstract organic forms and arabesques. Art Nouveau can be seen in part as a response to William Morris s Arts and Crafts Movement, and certainly the emphasis CHAP TER 26 on handcrafted, finely designed products reflects this. The design products of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848 1933) were another important influence on Art Nouveau, especially his stained-glass windows (fig. 26.28) and glass lampshades with their organic motifs. Having a gemlike luster and the spiritual glow of medieval stained glass, Tiffany products are generally based on nature, depicting wooded landscapes, flowers, and trees. Coming on the heals of the Arts and Crafts Movement and anticipating Art Nouveau, Tiffany technically falls into neither category, and is a category unto itself. Tiffany s New York store, however, was the inspiration for Bing s La Maison de l Art Nouveau. Important differences exist between the Arts and Crafts Movement and Art Nouveau. U like the Arts and Crafts designers, many Art Nouveau artists embraced mass production and new industrial materials. And while Art Nouveau designs are clearly organic, they are often purely abstract rather than based on identifiable botanical specimens, as is the case in Morris s and Tiffany s designs. The Public and Private Spaces of Art Nouveau Compared with dark, ponderous Victorian interiors, the buoyant naturalism of Art Nouveau was a breath of fresh air, exuding youth, liberation, and modernity. It shared with Symbolism the element of fantasy, in this case biomorphic fantasy, which can especially be seen in architecture. Art Nouveau architects concerned themselves equally with exterior finish and interior space. Their typically complex, animated façades endow Art Nouveau buildings with a sculptural quality that engages viewers as they approach. This energy continues in the interior, for Art Nouveau spaces pulsate with a sense of movement interior P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 927 26.28 Louis Comfort Tiffany. Manufactured by Tiffany Studios. A Wooded Landscape in Three Panels. ca. 1905. Glass, copper-foil, and lead, 861/2 × 1319/16 × 13/4" (219.7 × 334.2 × 4.4 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Brown Foundation Accessions dowment Fund. 96.765. A, B, C decoration and furnishings give the impression of having germinated and grown in situ. This effect is often enhanced by the admission of sunlight through glass ceilings or skylights, lending the space the fecundity of a greenhouse where everything seems to have grown spontaneously. H O R T A The style began in Brussels with Belgian architect Victor Horta (1861 1947). Born in Ghent, Horta studied drawing, textiles, and architecture at the city s Académie des Beaux-Arts, and worked in Paris before returning to Belgium to start his own practice. In 1892, Horta designed the Tassel House in Brussels. The centerpiece of this is the ironwork of the stairwell (fig. 26.29), the malleable wrought-iron columns and railings that were shaped into vines that evolve into whiplash tendrils on the walls, ceiling, and mosaic floor. The supporting role of the columns has been downplayed by making them as slender as possible. In a play on the Corinthian capital, they sprout ribbonlike tendrils that dissolve into arches. The linear patterns extend to the floor and wall, a device that further integrates the space visually. Sunlight filters through the glass ceiling, heightening the organic quality of the space. The curvilinear patterning derives from a variety of sources, including apanese prints and Gauguin s cloisonnism (see fig. 26.12), although Horta s undulating linearity would in turn influence contemporary art, as seen in Beardsley s Salomé (see fig. 26.20). Everything has an organic fluidity, a springlike sense of growth and life, which has the effect of destroying the conventional boxlike quality of interior space. VICTOR 26.29 Victor Horta. Interior stairwell of the Tassel House, Brussels. 1892 93. 928 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D organic, is quite different. If Horta suggests dynamic whiplash tendrils, Guimard evokes a lethargic prehistoric world, part plantlike, suggesting stalks and tendrils, and part zoomorphic, evoking praying mantises and dinosaurs. Even the lettering of the word Métropolitain morphs into strange organic characters, irregular, primitive, and foreboding. How appropriate for an architecture marking entrances to a new underworld. And how revealing that the style for a high-tech, machine world should be an escapist fantasy that is emphatically organic. Aside from his very public designs for the Métro, Guimard s practice was largely limited to private houses and apartment buildings for the haute bourgeoisie. He remained faithful to Art Nouveau even after it passed from fashion, around 1910. Among the most bizarre Art Nouveau creations sprung from the wild imagination of Antoni Gaudí (1853 1926). Gaudí worked in Barcelona, the next and last major stop for the short-lived Art Nouveau, and his style reflects the fervent Catalan nationalism of the period, drawing heavily upon Mediterranean architectural traditions. His remarkable Casa Milà (fig. 26.31), a large apartment house, expresses his fanatical devotion to the ideal of natural form, one quite different from Horta s plantlike designs. On the one hand, the building conjures up the Spanish Baroque, the Plateresque (indigenous Renaissance architecture suggesting elaborate silver plate), and the Moorish mosques of southern Spain. On the other, it is pure nature. Believing there are no straight lines in nature, Gaudí created an undulating façade and irregularly shaped interior spaces (fig. 26.32), in effect destroying the architectural box. With its huge ANTONI GAUDÍ 26.30 Hector Guimard. Métro station, Paris. 1900 G U I M A R D Art Nouveau next migrated to Paris, where its most famous practitioner was the architect Hector Guimard (1867 1942), who is especially renowned for designing the entrances to the Paris Métro, or subway, which opened in 1900 (fig. 26.30). Like Horta, he worked with wrought and cast iron, patinated a soft, earthy green, but his sensitivity, while still HECTOR 26.31 Antoni Gaudí. Casa Milà, Barcelona. 1905 10 26.32 Antoni Gaudí. Plan of typical floor, Casa Milà CHAP TER 26 P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 929 stone blocks, the exterior evokes austere seaside cliffs while the wrought-iron balconies resemble seaweed and the scalloped cornice mimics ocean waves. To twenty-first-century eyes, the chimneys may recall soft ice-cream cones, but in 1905, they would have evoked, among other things, sand castles. These references to the seashore suggest Barcelona s distinctive geographic, cultural, and economic relationship to the Mediterranean. Gaudí was a fervent supporter of Catalan nationalism, so Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, was especially symbolic for him. Perhaps more important, Gaudí was extremely religious, an ardent Catholic, and he viewed nature as a spiritual sanctuary and escape hatch from modernity. He spent the last decades of his life building an enormous Art Nouveau cathedral, La Sagrada Família, so vast in scale that it remains unfinished today. Just as Gaudí s buildings evoke the landscape and culture of Catalonia, the work of the Glasgow architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 1928) speaks to a decidedly northern, Scottish sensibility. Mackintosh s designs are often labeled Art Nouveau, and he certainly began in this camp, especially adhering to Arts and Crafts values, and retaining organic qualities in his work throughout his career. As can be seen in his most famous building, the Glasgow School of Art (fig. 26.33), built from 1897 to 1909, his work is infinitely more mainstream than Gaudí s, Guimard s, or Horta s. The façade is largely rectangular. Its austere windows, which hint at the Queen Anne revival style, dominate the building, making it look very geometric. The grid of the windows is reinforced by the horizontal overhang above the entrance. The entrance section evokes a Scottish baronial tower, within which is set an arched Baroque aedicula, or altar, with a Queen Anne oriel, or picture window, in a niche above. In other words, the building is an abstract presentation of CHARLES RENNIE MACKINTOSH 26.33 Charles Rennie Mackintosh. North façade of the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland. 1897 1909 26.34 Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Salon de Luxe, Willow Tea Rooms, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. 1904 930 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D revival styles, but those styles are so reduced to a geometric essence that they almost disappear. Modern architects, especially in Vienna, would be especially inspired by this abstracting process. The only suggestion of the curvilinear Art Nouveau is in the eccentric, organic ironwork, including the railings and fences, the entrance arch with lantern, and the strange plantlike brackets used by windowcleaners. Mackintosh s interiors, for which he is most noted, retain more of a balance between the geometric and organic, as seen in his 1904 Salon de Luxe at the Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow (fig. 26.34). The door and walls have a frail linear patterning suggesting willow branches, and the backs of the chairs gracefully buckle and taper, while their leg brackets curve. A severe grid of verticals and horizontals, however, epitomized by the nine squares on the backs of the chairs, sharply organizes the room, which nonetheless is quite elegant and refined. Regardless of labeling, Macintosh s design is certainly new and also total, encompassing every detail in the room, down to the door handle, all of which are beautifully handcrafted. While not the botanical and zoological fantasies of Horta and Guimard, Macintosh s vision equally dispatches the historical past and certainly charts strange territory, making tearoom guests feel as though they have passed through a magic door into a marvelous unidentifiable wonderland. AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE: THE CHICAGO SCHOOL Little did anyone know in 1871 that Chicago s devastating Great Fire would launch modern architecture and make American architects for the first time the most advanced in the world. Once the flames of the fire were extinguished, the issue at hand was not just one of rebuilding. Chicago had been growing rapidly, putting a premium on real estate, and now there was a need to maximize land use by building vertically. This was made possible by the invention of the safety elevator, perfected in New York in the 1850s and 1860s by Elisha Otis. Ambitious construction was delayed for ten years, however, due to the national financial collapse of 1873, which lasted through the decade. When rebuilding finally proceeded in the 1880s, it was dominated by young designers who had largely been trained as engineers with virtually no architectural background. This meant they were not hampered by strong preconceived notions of what buildings should look like and were open to allowing their structures to reflect the new technologies and materials they employed. They abandoned the historicism of revival architecture and designed abstract structures as they allowed form to follow function. The buildings they erected were technically so complicated and the workload was so great that the major architects paired off into complementary teams: Burnham and Root, Holabird and Roche, and Adler and Sullivan. Of this group, only Louis Sullivan had attended architectural school, one year at MIT and a half-year at the École des BeauxArts in Paris. CHAP TER 26 Henry Hobson Richardson: Laying the Foundation for Modernist Architecture Designed by Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838 1886), the Marshall Field Wholesale Store (fig. 26.35) provided an intellectual challenge to the new generation of Chicago architects. Born in New Orleans and educated at Harvard, Richardson rose to international fame for his Romanesque-revival work, which became so renowned that the style was eventually named after him. Made of stone, his buildings were massive, bold, and highly textured. They were also quite simplified, emphasizing volumetric forms. With the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, a seven-story building that took up an entire Chicago block, Richardson s style evolved to its most refined form, one that moved beyond the Victorian Romanesque revival. The building was composed of weighty stone walls made of red granite and red sandstone, and because it took up the entire city block, it felt massive, giving it a powerful physical presence. The scale and rough texture of the blocks as well as the dark hollows of the recessed windows added to the building s sculptural quality. The building was highly associational, or referential. The arches, especially when used by Richardson, recalled the Romanesque, although they evoked a fifteenth-century Florentine palazzo as well (see fig. 15.32). The three-tier layering of the building also calls to mind Beaux-Arts architecture (see fig. 25.9), a reference to the rigorous architectural program of the Paris École des Beaux-Arts that established strict design 26.35 Henry Hobson Richardson. Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Chicago. 1885 87. Demolished 1931 P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 931 principles. These rules included a stylobate-column-entablature configuration, that is, a base, rise, and crown format. In the Marshall Field building, the stylobate, or platform, was represented by the basement level, with the next two tiers representing the columnated level and the entablature. Despite parallels to past architecture, the building was remarkably abstract: There were no columns, piers, capitals, or entablatures per se. Instead the uniform stone, despite its rustication, was like a continuous skin covering the building. This innovative design that abstracted historical style would pose a major challenge for Chicago architects. Louis Sullivan and Early Skyscrapers Richardson did not consider himself a Modernist, and he was not one. But the abstraction of the Marshall Field building helped spawn Modernist architecture. As important as Richardson s influence were technical developments. As the Chicago fire clearly demonstrated, iron is not fire-resistant; intense heat makes it soften, bend, and, if hot enough, melt. To avoid towering infernos, 26.36 Louis Sullivan. Wainwright Building, St. Louis, Missouri. 1890 91. Destroyed 932 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D it was necessary to fireproof the metal, enveloping iron, and shortly thereafter steel (which was only developed as we know it today in the early twentieth century) with terra-cotta tiles and later in a coating of concrete (modern concrete, called Portland cement, was invented in England in 1825). The insulation also prevented corrosion. An equally important technological development was the invention of the curtain wall. like a self-supporting wall, the type Richardson used for the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, a curtain wall hangs from the lip of a horizontal beam at floor level on each story. Without this innovation, the base of the wall for a tall building would have to be extremely thick in order to support the weight of the wall above, severely limiting the number of floors. Furthermore, curtain walls allowed for entire walls to be made of glass, and with the development toward midcentury of plate glass, that is, large sheets of glass, it was now possible to design glass towers. The first extensive use of the curtain wall was in Chicago for the 1884 85 Home Insurance Building, which had a steel skeleton, and was designed by William enney, the elder statesman of the Chicago architects. The architect generally credited with playing the main role in developing the aesthetic implications of the steel skeleton into powerful architecture is Louis Sullivan (1856 1924). In 1880, Sullivan joined the Chicago firm of Dankmar Adler, which in 1883 became Adler and Sullivan (Adler left the firm in 1891). Adler was the engineer, planner, and project manager who kept building construction moving forward, while Sullivan was the idealistic visionary who provided the design concepts. Sullivan s early masterpiece is the Wainwright Building (fig. 26.36), erected in St. Louis in 1890 91. (Most of his major buildings, however, are in Chicago.) ing the curtain wall, Sullivan designed a building that reflects the grid structure of the steel skeleton, although for aesthetic purposes he doubled the number of external piers, with only every other one having a structural beam behind it. The major problem for the early architects of skyscrapers was how to design a building that rose so many floors, while maintaining a visually interesting exterior that did not rely on outmoded revival styles. Sullivan s solution was ingenious. Like Richardson s Marshall Field Wholesale Store, his building is largely abstract. The end piers are widened, as in Marshall Field, dramatically framing the building, and the spandrels (the decorated horizontal panels between piers) are recessed, both elements giving the building a monumental sculptural quality and the sense of a building evolving from a solid block. The seven-story colossal piers and the enormous one-story cornice add to this grandeur. Again, we see the Beaux-Arts stylobate-column-entablature configuration of the Marshall Field building, which feels even more Classical in the Wainwright Building because of the grid and absence of Romanesque arches. While the building s exterior presents a compilation of abstract, geometric forms, largely reflecting the substructure, Sullivan did not hesitate to design terra-cotta panels for the cornice and spandrels that feature a pattern based on an antique rinceau motif (an ornamental vine, leaf, or floral design). Sullivan intended these biomorphic decorations to symbolize his belief that architecture should utilize new technologies to promote social harmony and progress and to be part of a natural organic evolution of the world. Sullivan fervently believed in the spiritual theories of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688 1772), a Swedish philosopher, theologian, and Christian mystic who preached that universal forces run through and unite all things, each of which is otherwise unique and an individual. His building reflects Swedenborgianism, which became popular at this time along with so many other nontraditional religions and cults. The decoration, for example, allowed Sullivan to distinguish the various parts of the building, giving each a separate identity (e.g., the upper story, the spandrels), and yet at the same time, all of these distinctive parts are tightly woven together into a unified whole, as suggested by the powerful grid of piers and spandrels. The flowering plant life energizes the building, reflects the vitality of the human element within, and relates both to the universal current flowing through all things. Although he was down-to-earth, practical, and 26.38 Louis Sullivan. Cast-iron ornament, Schlesinger and Meyer Store 26.37 Louis H. Sullivan. Schlesinger and Meyer Store, then CarsonPirie-Scott store (now the Sullivan Center). Chicago. 1899 1904 CHAP TER 26 functional it was Sullivan who issued the famous dictum that form ever follows function he was also a visionary Symbolist. www.myartslab.com.) ww ww. w.my myar my arts ar tsla ts lab. la b.co b. com.) co . (See w Sullivan s style became considerably lighter, airier, and abstract by 1900, anticipating the floating, geometric, glass boxes of twentieth-century Modernist architecture. This style can be seen in the Schlesinger and Meyer Store in Chicago (fig. 26.37), which was originally a commission for the three-bay, nine-story section on the left but evolved into the twelve-story structure we see today. Now, the thin vertical piers actually reflect the skeleton behind, and the mechanomorphic façade echoes the structural steel grid behind it. The wall has virtually disappeared, giving way to glass. Instead of the enormous monumental one-story cornice we saw on the Wainwright Building, Sullivan s top-floor entablature is actually a hollow recessed balcony, capped by a sliver of a cornice, which instead of being a weighty lid seems to be a floating piece of cardboard, in keeping with the airy lightness of the building. There is still a Beaux-Arts base, but it seems recessed (although it is not) because of the horizontal molding above, making the nine floors of horizontal windows seem to float. The first floor dissolves in a wild flurry of Art Nouveau plant forms that cover cast-iron panels (fig. 26.38), in effect unifying the building with cosmic forces. With the Schlesinger and Meyer Store, the aesthetic for the Modernist skyscraper had perhaps reached its finest expression to date. P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 933 Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie House After studying engineering at the niversity of isconsin, Frank Lloyd right (1867 1959) worked for Sullivan from 1888 until 1893. His sensitivity and strengths, however, could not have been more different. hile Sullivan specialized in commercial buildings, right s forte was domestic architecture, although his public buildings are brilliant. Sullivan s innovations were largely in façades, whereas right s were in space, including interior space and its relationship to the exterior. right s architecture, like Sullivan s, is based on nature, and his reputation was established with what are known as his Prairie Houses, so-called because their strong horizontal sweep echoes the planarity of the Midwest landscape where the homes were built. The crowning achievement of right s Prairie Houses, which he began designing in the early 1890s, is the Robie House (fig. 26.39), designed in Chicago in 1908. The building was so shockingly modern it would take architects a good ten to 20 years to understand it and develop its implications. As can readily be seen from the exterior, the house is an abstract play of not only horizontals and verticals, but also of open spaces and enclosed 26.39 Frank Lloyd 934 PA RT I V right. Robie House, Chicago. 1908 10. T H E M O D ER N W O R L D volumes. The dramatic cantilevered roofs (which are not flat as suggested by our reproduction, but slightly sloping) define one space, while the floor of the terrace, or the balcony below, charts another. The interior spaces not only flow into the exterior, but into one another, for rooms, especially public rooms, generally do not have doors and four walls (fig. 26.40). right always claimed that his extraordinary ability to envision complex space and design came from playing with the Froebel blocks that his mother bought for him at the 1876 orld s Fair in Philadelphia. Developed by Friedrich Froebel as part of his campaign to institute kindergarten throughout Germany, the blocks were designed to serve as a child s first building blocks, and were part of a program that progressed to working with sticks and clay, folding paper, and weaving various materials. The Froebel gifts, as each stage was called, not only taught right to think in terms of abstract form, but also organic growth. Froebel was influenced by crystallography and consequently emphasized pattern making, not construction, with the pattern spreading out uniformly from a center row (the child was required to use all of the blocks). hen it was complete, the child was encouraged to attach symbolic content to the shapes, relating guest room entrance hall boiler room laundry garage billiard room kitchen servants living room court Lower Floor dining room Upper Floor children's playroom 26.40 Plan of obie House the patterns to the living world of plants and the cosmos (suns and stars, for example). Equally important for Wright s development was a visit to the apanese temple at the 1893 Chicago World s air. Here, he saw the dramatic projection of eaves, and severely geometrically shaped rooms that had sliding doors, which allowed one room to flow into another. Everything in a apanese building was as tightly interlocked as in a roebel project. As abstract and geometric as the Robie House is, the home resonates with nature and the organic. Even in our reproduction, the house, made of a horizontal brick manufactured to Wright s specifications (the face is 11 2 by 5 inches), appears perfectly integrated into the land, its lateral spread paralleling the surrounding plains. Wright thought of his architecture as organic, evolving much as a crystal develops or a tree grows. The Robie House, like many of his domestic designs, radiates from a large masonry fireplace, which Wright saw as a domestic altar to the gods of shelter. The rest of the house develops organically from this fulcrum, with one room naturally flowing into another and into the exterior, which in turn is integrated into the surrounding land. This sense of growth can readily be seen from the exterior, where the lateral spread of roofs, terraces, and balconies seems to be in constant movement. The picturesque variety of overhangs and recesses creates a play of light and shadow that we do not normally associate with architecture, but rather with nature. Wright s interior design also embraces this organic note. Reproduced here is the living room from the rancis W. Little House (fig. 26.41), perhaps his finest extant early interior. Influenced by William Morris s Arts and Crafts Movement as well as the principles, if not the look, of Art Nouveau, Wright, when possible, designed every detail of his interiors, with everything hand-made and of the highest quality. Like his architecture, his furniture and designs are geometric, continuing the spatial interplay of his buildings. But the geometric designs that appear on the leaded stained-glass windows and ceiling grillwork are actually abstractions of plant and landscape motifs, and the palette of the room features somber, yet warm, earth colors. As much as 26.41 rank Lloyd Wright. Living room of the rancis W. Little House, Wayzata, Minnesota, designed 1912 14, as installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New ork. Purchase Bequest of Emily Crane Chadbourne, 1972. 1972.60.1 CHAP TER 26 P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 935 we may want to see early Wright as an abstract, machine-age thinker conceptually playing with spaces and completely breaking with tradition, his theories and sensitivity are very much of the 1890s he still has one foot planted in the Symbolist nineteenth century that advocated a retreat from modernity into the arms of nature and its rejuvenating spiritual forces. P H O T O G A P H A N D TH A D V N T O ILM The primary preoccupation of photographers at the end of the century was the ongoing debate about whether photography was art. Complicating the matter was the dramatic increase in nonart photography. The invention of the half-tone printing process was one reason for this upsurge, for it resulted in photographs being printed directly in newspapers, magazines, and books using either lithographic or relief printing. It also brought about the rise of the picture postcard, which during the height of its popularity in 1907 8 resulted in some 667 million postcards, most with pictures, being sent through the U.S. Mail. Another reason for the proliferation of photographs was the invention of dry plates, which replaced the awkward and impractical wet-plate process. Now, photographers could work faster and go anywhere. The process reduced exposure time to one-fiftieth of a second, and hand-held cameras with shutters were invented, making tripods unnecessary. Cameras could now record movement. And now cameras and prints were readily available at low cost to everybody. In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate Company of Rochester, New York, introduced the Kodak camera. It came loaded with a paper roll containing 100 frames, which, once exposed, were sent back to the company in the camera for developing and printing. The company s advertisement declared, You press the button We do the rest. Also appearing about this time was the single-lens reflex camera, which had a mirror that allowed the photographer to see the image in a viewer. Suddenly, everyone was taking pictures, and the word snapshot came into common parlance. Toward 1890, there were 161 photographic societies worldwide and 60 photographic journals. The medium became so popular that many newspapers carried an amateur photography column. Pictorialist Photography and the Photo Secession To counter the image of photography as a ubiquitous, mindless popular tool best suited for documenting the visual world, organizations sprang up dedicated to promoting the medium as high art. The first was the Wien Kamera Klub (Vienna Camera Club), founded in 1891, soon followed by the Linked Ring in London and the Photo-Club de Paris (1894). The Berlin, Munich, and Vienna Secessions, dedicated to breaking down any hierarchical ranking of the arts, showed art photography. In 1902, Alfred Stieglitz quit the conservative Camera Club of New York to form the Photo Secession, taking its name from the European secession groups. All of these photography organizations had international memberships, often with some of the same members, mounted 26.42 Peter Henry Emerson, Poling the Marsh Hay. 1886. Platinum print. Gernsheim Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin 936 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D exhibitions, and published magazines. And they all promoted a Pictorialist aesthetic, placing a premium on a painterly, artistic look, countering the sharp focus that characterized postcard, stereoscope, newspaper, and magazine images and the single fixed focus of the Kodak camera. Photographs by art photographers were taken out of focus, like those of ulia Margaret Cameron, whose work experienced a resurgence of interest. Pictorialist photographs were often highly textured, as a result of gum being brushed onto the printing paper before exposure or due to the use of a rough, pebbly paper. The British photographer Peter Henry Emerson (1856 1936) became a role model for Pictorialist photography, although ironically his own aim was to combine art and science by applying a scientific approach to the creation of the image His pictures were meant to look scientific, not artistic. Emerson was a medical doctor, who abandoned the profession for photography in 1885. He was influenced by the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz s theory of vision, which maintains that the eye at any one time can only focus on one area, with everything else becoming hazy. anting to make a realistic photography based on scientific principle, Emerson set out to produce images that replicated Helmholtz s optical premise. In Poling the Marsh Hay (fig. 26.42), the foreground woman is most in focus while the rest of the image is mildly blurred or indistinct. The picture appeared in Emerson s book Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1888), a folio of 40 mounted platinum prints, a photographic process that yielded an extraordinarily fine range of soft gray tones since the platinum lies directly on the surface of the paper, and is not embedded in albumen or a gelatin emulsion. Emerson was fascinated by the rural world of southeast England, where time seemed to stand still and hay was harvested by hand, not with the new steam-driven tractors. In this nostalgic image, we are presented with a Romantic view of an idyllic life of humans immersed in nature. Ironically, Emerson s scientific goal to realistically replicate the world as the eye sees it resulted in a poetic timeless vision, a soft-focused dreamworld of indistinct lush grays and of mysteriously floating darks and lights, such as a ghostly silhouetted tree and the light mystically shimmering on the canal and marshes. PETER HENRY EMERSON K Ä S E B I E R The international Pictorialists took their lead from Emerson and Cameron, among others, and similarly created painterly, dreamlike images. New orker Gertrude Käsebier (1852 1934) was one of the more prominent figures in the group, becoming a member of the Linked Ring in 1900, less than five years after taking up photography, and one of the founding members of Stieglitz s Photo Secession in 1902. Fleeing a wretched marriage, she enrolled in art classes at the Pratt Institute in 1889, and soon took up the camera with the intention of making art, although she supported herself through studio portraiture. In Blessed Art Thou Among Women (fig. 26.43), an 1899 platinum print on apanese tissue, a thin paper, we see Käsebier displaying the hallmarks of Pictorialism a soft, grainy image, GERTRUDE CHAP TER 26 26.43 Gertrude sebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women. 1899. Platinum print, 91*16 + 53*16" (23 + 13.2 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New ork. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933. (33.43.132) slightly out of focus, and with a spectacular range of lush grays that only a platinum print can provide, made all the more delicate by being printed on a gossamerlike apanese tissue. The mother wears a white Pre-Raphaelite-looking house robe and conspicuously stands before a religious image of the Annunciation on the back wall. The daughter, who is about to cross the threshold to go out into the world, is encased in a mandorlalike divine light created by the brilliant white that surrounds her, especially defined by the small gap between her and her mother. The scene has a spiritual quality, set within a sanctum dedicated to maternal protection and nurturing. In a modern urban society becoming increasingly fast, fragmented, and materialistic, Käsebier creates a tranquil domestic sanctuary based on, as the title suggests, the P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 937 nurturing care of a mother. sebier s image shares with Mary Cassatt s The Child s Bath (see fig. 25.21) the same late nineteenth-century feminist belief in the important role that women play in the development of children, and with Cameron s Sister Spirits (see fig. 25.36) a female bonding or spiritual sisterhood designed to protect the rights and future of their gender. STEICHEN Along with sebier and Stieglitz, dward Steichen (1879 1973) also helped to found the Photo EDWARD Secession. Steichen s early contributions to this movement were painterly and moody, his landscapes having the same poetic and mystical quality found in the Tonalist painting that was inspired by histler s Aestheticism. His early style can be seen in his 1902 portrait !odin with His Sculptures "ictor Hugo and The Thinker (fig. 26.44), a gum print. #$ing the painterly effect of the gum combined with the fuzziness of the focus, he created an image that looks more handcrafted than mechanically reproduced, demonstrating that the photographer made aesthetic decisions that profoundly affected the meaning of the image. Picturing together the brooding silhouettes of Rodin and The Thinker, Steichen uses them to frame a brightly lit, phantomlike "ictor Hugo. Clearly, Steichen identifies Rodin with The Thinker. One of the readings of the famous sculpture is that it is meant to represent Rodin and the daunting creative process and mental struggle behind the development of a work of art. This interpretation certainly accounts for this image, as suggested by the light striking Rodin s brain and the emergence of Victor Hugo as an hile in some apparition, a figment of Rodin s imagination. respects Rodin is portrayed here as a Romantic genius, we also sense a Symbolist psychology at work ideas do not gush from 26.45 Alfred Stieglitz, The 1i+2 o7 Am8i+ion. 1910. Photogravure on 9apanese tissue mounted on paperboard, 133*8 + 101*4" (34 + 26 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. 1949. (49.55.15) his imagination and emotions, but instead they are the result of a long creative struggle, a prolonged search into the dark recesses of the mind. Several of the Pictorialists in the Stieglitz circle photographed %ew &ork City, although paradoxically their images have a Romantic atmospheric quality more appropriate to landscape than the hard geometric look we associate with urban concrete and steel. By 1900, %ew &ork, not Chicago, was the city of skyscrapers, and as America attained global technological and financial superiority, %ew &ork and its cathedrals of capitalism became an emblem of this superiority. ven though Stieglitz (1864 1946) abhorred modernity and lamented the city s mad, useless Materiality, he repeatedly photographed Gotham from the early 1890s up to 1910, as seen in The City of Ambition (fig. 26.45) of 1910. Typical of Pictorialist images of %ew &ork, his pictures allow meteorological effects, such as snow, mist, steam, and fog, to upstage the buildings. In The City of Ambition, Stieglitz uses the Pictorialists characteristic soft focus. The metropolis looms large, but buildings are indistinct and in ALFRED STIEGLITZ 26.44 (dward Steichen, )odin *i+h His ,c-lp+-res .ic+or H-/o and The Thin0er. 1902. Gum print, 141*4 + 123*4" (36.3 + 32.4 cm). Courtesy George (astman House 938 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D shadow, softened by puffs of smoke and the clouds behind. Light shimmering on the water gets as much attention as the skyline, and we are very much aware of the glow of the sun setting behind the buildings. Stieglitz capitalizes on this light to orchestrate a beautiful symphony of gray rectangular forms harmonizing with rich darks and bright whites. He captures the awesome scale of the city, this monster as he described it, and he suggests, by immersing it in an atmospheric veil, that it seems to comfortably coexist with the awesome forces of nature. <ocumentary Photography Among the most powerful documentary photographs made in the closing decades of the nineteenth century were those chronicling the horrific working and living conditions of the modern city. Some of the best-known work was made in New =ork, a crowded, fast-growing metropolis teeming with indigent immigrants and migrants readily victimized by unscrupulous landlords and employers. These masses were unsupported by social services and unprotected by the government. Conditions were especially appalling in the immigrant slums on the Lower East Side and the violent, lawless bars and brothels of Five Points, a district largely centering on the Bowery. >?like the Pictorialists, whose techniques and subjects often softened the realism of their images, documentary photographers embraced the medium s capacity to produce direct, seemingly truthful records. Some documentary photographers felt that their work attained the status of art due to its apparent ability to convey truth. Others pursued documentary photography for commercial or even political ends. @acob Riis numbered among the latter. J A C O B R I I S Emigrating from Denmark in l870, Qacob Riis (1849 1914) became a police reporter in the roughest neighborhoods of New =ork City, and was so appalled by the degradation and squalor he found there that he began photographing it in order to generate support for social reform. He made lantern slides of his images to illustrate his lectures, and published others in newspapers and magazines. Although Riis did not consider himself an artist, his works are undeniably striking. In order to create authentic, unposed, spontaneous images, he used a flash, a magnesium flash powder (the predecessor of the flashbulb), which allowed him to enter tenements, flop houses, and bars at night and instantaneously take a picture, temporarily blinding his shocked subjects but capturing a candid image, as seen in Xive Zents a S[ot (fig. 26.46). Here, he has burst into an overcrowded sleeping den on Bayard Street, creating an image that documents the greedy abuse of the homeless and leaves no doubt as to the unsanitary conditions that made such squalid, illegal quarters a breeding ground for disease. Riis published his photographs in a groundbreaking book, Ho\ the ]ther Half Lives (1890), which in part resulted in the bulldozing of the shanties in the Bayard Street neighborhood and the transformation of the site into a park. An army of social photographers emerged around and after the turn of the century, among the best known Lewis Hine and @essie Tarbox Beals. CHAP TER 26 26.46 `acob Riis, aice dents a Seot, hnauthorized Lodgings in a Bayard Street ienement. ca. 1889. Gelatin silver print, 8 * 10" (20.3 * 25.4 cm). Museum of the City of New lork, `acobs Riis Collection n155 Riis s work has something of the look of a snapshot, an uncomposed, quickly taken photograph, and with the advent of small hand-held cameras, this look was common to amateur photography. The snapshot, like the documentary photograph, returns us to the issue of photography as art. Since 1890, virtually everyone in developed countries has accumulated albums, drawers, and boxes filled with snapshots, visual memories of the past. Are they art^ In a sense, they are all art, as will be discussed in the next chapter when we study Marcel Duchamp. _hat is really at issue is whether it is good art, and the answer here is obvious. The vast majority of the billions of images are generic, banal, and predictable, and their value is largely personal, which is no small matter. And yet, there is that rare person with an extraordinary aesthetic sensitivity who, with little technical instruction, produces remarkable images. Such a person was Henri Lartigue (1894 1986), born into a wealthy French family who gave him his first camera when he was six years old. _ith this expensive toy, Lartigue proceeded to document his privileged family, filling some 120 albums with images that also captured the advent of modernity automobiles and airplanes, for example. His images, such as My Hydroglider \ith Pro[eller, are often humorous, if not outright uproarious. Made in 1904 at the age of ten, the picture shows Lartigue in his bathtub, his head surrealistically cut off at the neck by the water line and floating alongside his toy hydroplane, a toy based on a modern invention. Reproduced here is a later work, Avenue du Bois du Bologne (fig. 26.47), made at the age of 17 and part of a series of photographs the teenage artist made in one day of fashionably dressed women parading their wealth on the main thoroughfare in the famous Paris park HENRI LARTIGUE P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 939 26.4 Henri Lartigue, Aenue du Bois du Bologne (oman ith urs, or Arlette Preost, called Anna la Pradina, ith her dogs hichi et Gogo ) Janier , Aenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris. 1911. Gelatin silver print, 22*3 + 41*3" (6.6 + 11.1 cm). Donation acques Henri Lartigue, Paris of the same name. Here, Lartigue has captured an amply furdraped animal lover walking her dogs, their scrawny build humorously contrasted with her materialistic bulk, and their nervousness with the inanimate drooping skins of her handwarmer. This wonderful composition, which has the voyeuristic quality of a Degas painting, also includes an automobile and a horse-drawn carriage the new and the old. Its representation of affluence and the inclusion of a car have made it one of the icons of the Belle Éooque. Lartigue eventually attended art school and became known as a painter as well as a professional photographer, producing numerous portraits and society photographs. However, his boyhood photographs went unknown until he was 69, and when discovered they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New rork and in a large spread in Life magazine, touted not only for their quality but also because they captured the essence of the time. Their legacy also includes the introduction of humor into the medium, which would become a regular feature of twentiethcentury fine-art photography. Meanwhile, it was not until the 1990s that the aesthetic value of the anonymous snapshot was appreciated, driving collectors and curators to scour flea markets and estate sales for that rare remarkable work, that one-in-amillion shot with riveting subject matter or compelling aesthetic qualities. Called folk, vernacular, and sometimes found photography, it is today collected and exhibited by several of the world s best-known museums. 940 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D Motion Photograshy and Moxing Pictures In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge (1830 1904), who had made some of the most remarkable photographs of rosemite the decade before, was hired by Leland Stanford, a business tycoon, politician, and founder of Stanford {|iversity, to use photography to resolve one of the great questions plaguing horse trainers and artists for centuries} Do all four legs of a horse leave the ground when it is running~ Setting up 12 cameras on a raceway and creating a calibrated backdrop, he made a series of sequential photographs (fig. 26.48) that once and for all answered the question} res. Artists ever since have used these images to draw a horse in motion, including Degas in 1879. Muybridge became a celebrity, and was invited to the {niversity of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to make studies in locomotion, producing in the 1880s some 100,000 images of nudes and animals. He published 781 plates in Animal Locomotion (1887). These motion studies convey a peculiarly modern sense of dynamics, reflecting, especially in their regularly repeated serial imagery, the new tempo of life in the machine age. The French physiologist Étienne-ules Marey (1830 1904) saw Muybridge s horse-in-motion photographs reproduced in the magazine La ature, and became obsessed with studying motion as well. He used a single camera, the lens open, placed behind a rotating disk with regularly placed slots. hen a slot appeared, an image was recorded, so that a moving object would appear in a different position each time. Since he was interested in the 26.8 Eadweard Muybridge, Untitled (sequence photographs of the trot and gallop), from La Nature, December 1878. Gravures. George Eastman House, Rochester, New York mechanics of locomotion and not the figure itself, he clothed his models in black body suits with a white stripe running along the length of the side. The models were then photographed in action against a black wall. Thus, only the white line of movement is visible in his photographs (fig. 26.49). Though Marey saw no artistic merit in these studies, the results offer fascinating abstractions. And, as we shall see, they would influence artists who were interested in rendering the movement of an object through space. As important, Marey s and Muybridge s studies reflected a rapidly increasing interest in creating moving pictures. They were building on the popular parlor-game amusements that created images in motion. One device, called a zoetrope, consisted of slotted cylinders with a sequence of images of, for example, a moving horse on the inside. When spun and viewed through the rapidly moving slots, the horse would appear to be trotting. Muybridge invented an apparatus he called the zoöpraxiscope, 26.9 (a and b) Étienne-Jules Marey, Man in Black Suit with White Stripes Down Arms and Legs, Walking in Front of a Black Wall. ca. 1884. Chronophotograph. Institut Marey, Beaune, France CHAP TER 26 P ROGRESS AND ITS DISCON TEN TS: P OST- IM PRESS IONISM , SYMBOL ISM, AND ART NO UV EAU , 1880 1905 941 which similarly used a cylinder, but the image was projected, like a magic lantern slide, onto a wall. Enticed by the implications of Muybridge s zoöraxiscope, Thomas Edison in 1894 patented the kinetoscope, which consisted of moving images recorded on a 50foot roll of flexible film that were viewed in a peepshowlike box. The show lasted 13 seconds. The following year, the French Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, introduced the handcranked camera and electric film projector and produced the first moving picture, which lasted 25 seconds. It showed workers leaving their father s factory at the end of the day. In America, movie production was dominated by two companies, Thomas Edison and American Mutascope, which sent crews around the world to record various monuments, sites, and events. The pictures lasted only a few minutes at best and were presented in vaudeville houses in between acts. Filmmakers were now confronted by the same crisis that photographers had faced in 1839: What to film and how to film it. Generally, they focused on movement and action, as can be seen in Edison s 1899 moving picture of a train crossing the Brooklyn Bridge (fig. 26.50 to view the film New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, No. 2, see hdl.loc.govloc.mbrsmiedmp.1734), filmed by a fixed camera positioned at the front of the first car. The Brooklyn Bridge film is revealing on many levels. First, it is a reminder that the early films, like those of today, had to appeal to a mass audience and present subjects of popular interest. Technological inventions and moving images of modernity, such as subways, skyscraper construction, the one million electric lights at the new Coney Island Amusement Park, and sleek oceanliners and battleships coming into New York harbor, seem to make up a large portion of the existing Edison inventory from the late 1890s. Second, the film is remarkable for its modern attitude toward speed and space. As the train travels through the trussed structure, we become mesmerized by the rhythm of the wooden supports passing by and feel the speed of the electrified cars. Soon, the square structure becomes just an abstraction of squares within squares (fig. 26.50). As we shall see in the next chapter, objects, space, and time were understood much differently in a modern mechanized era dominated by electricity, vertiginous 55-story office towers, high-speed trains, cars, and, soon, airplanes and moving pictures. 26.50 Thomas Edison. Still from the film New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, No. 2. September 22, 1899. Black-and-white film, 213 942 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 1878 Eadweard Muybridge makes sequence photographs of a horse galloping Progress and its Discontents: Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau, 1880 1905 1870 1880 Rodin begins The Gates of Hell 1880 * 1878 First International Congress of Women s Rights, Paris * 1880s European nations colonize Africa * 1882 The Edison Illuminating Electric Company provides electricity to lower Manhattan * 1884 Seurat shows A Bathing Place at first exhibition of Independent Artists, Paris * 1886 Jean Moréas publishes a Symbolist manifesto in Figaro Littéraire * 1888 Van Gogh and Gauguin go to Arles 1888 The Nabis are founded in France 1888 Karl Benz begins manufacturing a combustion-engine automobile in Germany * 1890 The National American Woman Suffrage Association formed 1891 Gauguin goes to Tahiti 1885 87 Cézanne s Mont Sainte-Victoire 1886 Seurat shows La Grande Jatte at the last Impressionist exhibition, marking the end of Impressionism and the beginning of Postimpressionism 1890 1891 Claude Monet s Wheatstack, Sun in the Mist * 1895 Siegfried Bing opens La Maison de l Art Nouveau in Paris * 1897 Vienna Secession founded, with Gustav Klimt as its first president * 1900 The Paris Métro opens 1900 Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams 1901 First transatlantic radio signal * 1903 Wright brothers first flight 1889 Van Gogh s Starry Night 1890 91 Louis Sullivan s Wainwright Building is erected, St. Louis, Missouri 1900 1892 Victor Horta designs Tassel House, Brussels 1910 1893 Edvard Munch s The Scream 943 T CHAPTER 27 Toward Abstraction: The Modernist Revolution, 1904 1914 HE OPENING DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SAW THE continued upward march of modernity. But, as in the preceding decades, artists both embraced and fled from progress. In some instances, they even clung to tradition while they purveyed the new, which we shall see, for example, in the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, two artists who successfully knitted together the new and revolutionary in style with the familiar and enduring in subject matter. The period is marked by landmark scientific developments that artists, like the public at large, could not ignore. In 1890, the German physicist Max Planck (1858 1947) proved that energy was not distinguishable from matter, in effect beginning a line of thought that led to quantum physics. He showed that energy was emitted and absorbed in bundles called quanta, disproving the idea that energy existed in a stable, uniform state. Energy and, therefore, matter were in constant flux. This concept was especially pertinent to the discovery of radioactivity in 1902 by British physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871 1937). In 1913, the atom itself was further redefined when the Dane Niels Bohr (1885 1962) declared that it consisted of electrons traveling in specific orbits around an atom s nucleus, and that matter was not solid but instead in constant movement. But the greatest amendment to classical physics was proposed by Albert Einstein (1879 1955). Einstein s revolutionary concepts appeared in a series of papers published in 1905 and 1916, and they included his theory of relativity, which claimed that time, space, and motion were not fixed but all relative, especially in relation to the observer s own position. The Newtonian world order, based on notions of energy and matter that remained Detail of figure 27.14, Vasily Kandinsky, Sketch I for Composition VII. CHAP TER 27 stable, was now supplanted by a more complex and contingent notion of the universe. Similar ideas emerged in accounts of human behavior by philosophers and psychologists. Henri Bergson (1859 1941), a French philosopher, was so influential in the first years of the twentieth century that he was well known even to the general public. Bergson postulated that we experience life not as a series of continuous rational moments, but as intuited random memories and perceptions that we then piece together to form ideas. The world, therefore, is complex and fractured, or as expressed by the Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James (1842 1910), whose theories independently paralleled Bergson s, a booming buzzing confusion. Only intuition transcended this chaos. The mind, according to Bergson, was pure energy, an élan vital ( vital force ) that penetrated the essence of all things. While Bergson was philosophically redefining consciousness, the Viennese neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856 1939) continued to refine his ideas of the unconscious through observations made during clinical practice, an approach that he felt gave his conclusions a scientific basis. Despite taking a different approach from Bergson, Freud likewise developed a model of human consciousness as fragmented and conflicted. Artists now pictured this new, constantly shifting, even fractured world discovered by scientists, philosophers, and psychologists. Some artists, such as Picasso and Georges Braque, in a sense emulated scientists, treating their studios like laboratories TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 945 Worpswede Alfeld-anBerlin der-Leine Dessau Cologne Dresden Weimar GERMANY CZECH REPUBLIC CANADA Dan ube BOHEMIA NORT H AM ER ICA Berne SWITZ. M i ss o ur Great Salt Lake AUSTRIA DENMARK l Ba GREAT HOLLAND Berlin BRITAIN GERMANY London Paris Milan SWITZ. ITALY MAINE i FRANCE Ferrara Chicago New York CONNECTICUT Philadelphia Washington, D.C. Long Island St. Louis See inset 200 km Collioure 200 miles SPAIN BULGARIA Black Sea ITALY Medite ip iss ALGERIA Mi ss MEXICO Kiev Vienna AUSTRIA-HUNGARY Belgrade Constantinople rr ne OT TOMAN EMPIRE a UNITED STATES Moscow RU SSIA Rome Madrid PORTUGAL pi San Francisco Munich Murnau FRANCE Zürich NORWAY SWEDEN Se a Brussels Paris ti c Amsterdam N AT L A NT IC ATL Gulf of Mexico an Sea MOROCCO EGYPT OC E AN CUBA AF RICA Mexico City Seaa C ari b b ean Se PACIFIC OCEAN 1,000 km S OUTH A M ER IC A 1,000 miles Map 27.1 Europe and North America in August 1914 in which to analyze the very language of painting and where each creative breakthrough served as a steppingstone to the next as they sought to develop a new model of visual perception. Others, such as the Italian Futurists, embraced modernity and used new scientific discoveries, along with the radical stylistic developments of Picasso and Braque, to express the psychology of modern life and the impact of the technological wonders transforming the world. Other artists, however, especially many of the German Expressionists, sought an antidote to the cold, impersonal tenor and crass materialism of modernity and tried to invest contemporary life with spirituality. Continuing Gauguin s quest to find a spiritual peace in a so-called primitive world that was in tune with nature, many artists turned to the direct, more abstract vocabulary of tribal art as well as to children s, folk, and medieval art. Many of these artists were heavily influenced by Theosophy, a brand of mysticism that dates back to Plato, but that in the nineteenth century took new form in the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by the Russian émigrée, occultist, medium, and mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky. Basically, Theosophists claimed all religions are the same, with each containing an essential component of one larger grand religion. Therefore, all had to be studied. More important, Theosophists claimed that all creation is part of one eternal life, a Radical Unity, and that everything is therefore mystically interconnected. For artists attempting to visualize the spiritual, the essence of which cannot be seen and is therefore abstract, the new stripped-down vocabulary of art was the perfect vehicle. 946 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D FAUVISM The rise of Fauvism, the first major style to emerge in the twentieth century, is part of a colorist tradition that can be traced back through Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, and Delacroix to Titian and the Venetians. The Fauves, however, took the free, expressive use of color to new heights. Van Gogh and Gauguin had the greatest impact on the group, as is readily apparent in the work of Henri Matisse (1869 1954) and André Derain (1880 1954). Matisse was well aware of the aesthetic traditions with which he was wrestling. Trained in the studio of Gustave Moreau (see page 918), Matisse had received an exacting academic education at the École des Beaux-Arts. He therefore understood the extent to which he was both continuing and breaking tradition when, in 1905, he presented his latest pictures at the Salon d Automne, or Autumn Salon, an important annual venue for vanguard artists established in 1903 by Matisse and Derain, among other artists. As exhibitions of avant-garde art proliferated in Paris at the turn of the century, the Salon d Automne enjoyed a special status as a juried show where critics anticipated seeing the best of the new work. Few critics or other viewers for that matter were prepared for what they saw there in 1905. By that year, Matisse had not only moved beyond his academic training with Moreau, but had passed through an Impressionist phase in the 1890s, then a Cézannesque period, and finally a NeoImpressionist stage. Strongly influenced by the Post-Impressionists use of color for formal and expressive ends, Matisse pushed the independence of color even further. His experiments proved 27.1 Henri Matisse, Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat). 1905. Oil on canvas, 313*4 + 231*2" (80.6 + 59.7 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bequest of Elise S. Haas. 91.161. too radical for some. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles was so shocked by the orgy of pure colors that he encountered in the work of Matisse, Derain, and their colleagues at the Salon d Automne, that he declared the pictures fauves, or wild beasts. A classic example of the Fauve work exhibited in 1905 is Femme au chapeau (fig. 27.1). While the subject evokes a tradition of coloristic, virtuoso portraiture that stretches back to VigéeLebrun, Rubens, and Titian (see figs. 23.29, 20.3, and 16.33, respectively), Matisse s use of color is totally new. As with Impressionism, the color is intense, the image constructed of primary and secondary colors that look as if they have been squeezed directly from the tube. But now color does not have a representational function, adhering to a specific object. Instead it seems to have a life all its own, with patches of color sitting next to one another in what seems like random fashion. Along with the brushwork, color seems to reside uniformly on the surface of the image, reflecting Matisse s careful study of Cézanne s paintings. On the one hand, the background splashes of greens, yellows, CHAP TER 27 reds, and blues appear to exist on the same plane as the head and body in the foreground, locking all together as in one continuous flat mosaic. On the other, there is just enough overlapping of representational objects, such as arm and torso, to create space, and of course there is the abstract pictorial space suggested by contiguous planes of color and brushstroke, as we saw in Cézanne. Matisse, however, has dispensed with Cézanne s structure and monumentality, and instead achieves compositional coherence by balancing intense, complementary hues applied with brash, seemingly spontaneous brushwork. Traditionally, art historians have placed the work of the Fauves in the category of Expressionism, but this is problematic, since the term generally applies to work displaying an outpouring of emotion a tortured, anguished, or a pained state of mind. Despite the riot of color and chaos of brushstrokes, The Woman with the Hat is not about the sitter s or the artist s psychology. The figure is nothing more than an armature for an exercise in design and the release of color from a naturalistic or documentary function. The same is true of Matisse s landscapes and still lifes from this period as well. André Derain, likewise, understood painting as an intellectual rather than an emotional medium. His Mountains at Collioure (fig. 27.2), a subject located in the south of France, where he was painting with Matisse in 1905, may seethe with Van Gogh s energetic brushwork and Gauguin s arabesques, but Derain did not intend it to embody those artists spirituality or primitivism. Like the figure for Matisse, the landscape is just a vehicle for Derain s complex play of joyous color and surface design. Derain s overriding interest is in the formal meaning abstract qualities of image making, with special emphasis on bright color functioning in a nonrepresentational role. The Fauves were never an organized group. The term was applied by critics to artists, many of whom had been friends since 1900, who used bright color and happened to show together at the Salon d Automne of 1905, where the similarity of their work was recognized. By 1908, Fauvism had disintegrated. For Matisse, it was just one more stage toward making art that was, as he put it, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue. In other words, Matisse sought to use color in an abstract way that was beautiful, peaceful, serene, and sensuous. We can see Matisse beginning to move out of Fauvism in his 1905 06 painting Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life) (fig. 27.3). This work shows the influence not only of Derain s curvilinear patterning but also of first-hand experience with Gauguin s paintings; Gauguin s estate was being stored in Collioure, and Matisse visited the collection twice. The color in Le Bonheur remains intense and nonrealistic, but now it is contained in graceful arabesques. Matisse s most innovative move here is to dispense with logical space and scale while increasing the abstraction. No matter how abstract and flat Derain s and Matisse s Fauvist pictures of just a year earlier are, they still project a rational progression of space. Now, in Matisse s work, that space is gone, as two enormous reclining nudes in the middle ground are as large as, if TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 947 27.2 André Derain, Mountains at Collioure. 1905. Oil on canvas, 32 + 391*2" (81.5 + 100 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. John Hay Whitney Collection 27.3 Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life). 1905 06. Oil on canvas, 5'8" + 7'93*4" (1.74 + 2.38 m). The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania 948 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 27.4 Henri Matisse, The ed Studio. 1911. Oil on canvas, 5111*4" + 721*4" (1.81 + 2.19 m). Museum of Modern Art, New ork. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund not larger than, the pipe player and kissing couple in the foreground. Figures dissolve into one another and trees into sky and hills, so that it is nearly impossible to tell which sits in front of which. Reality gives way to a joyous abstract orchestration of colored lines and planes, which takes its hedonistic cue from the Classical idylls of ritual, dance, and music making of uvis de Chavannes (see fig. 26.5). The pipes, garlands, shepherd, and sense of Graeco-Roman nudity evoke an archaic Classical world, the same world conjured by such French painters as oussin and Claude (see figs. 21.7 and 21.8). Because of the intensity of its color, Le Bonheur is generally labeled a Fauvist picture. By 1907, however, Matisse s palette, while still colorful, was subdued, becoming sensuous and serene rather than joyfully riotous. We can see this new sensitivity in his 1911 The ed Studio (fig. 27.4). While the subject is again a conventional one in this case, the artist s studio in Matisse s hands, the theme takes on new import. On the one hand, reassuringly familiar objects appear, such as pencils, a collection of studio props arranged as a still life, and several of Matisse s own canvases and along the right wall his sculpture. On the other hand, The ed Studio offers a viewer a completely novel visual experience through the manipulation of color and line to radically redefine pictorial space. As the title indicates, the painting s keynote is the color red, which is like a flat window shade pulled through the entire canvas. CHAP TER 27 Basically unvarying in tone, it momentarily becomes floor, wall, and tablecloth because of the white-line drawing, before popping back to the surface as a perfectly flat red shade. Even the white lines that delineate the table, high-backed chair, and wall, for example, and suggest recession and thus space, ironically reinforce the two-dimensionality of the image, for they are not painted lines. Rather, they are slivers of canvas that Matisse has allowed to show through. Matisse s slightly rust-colored red is highly evocative. It is enticing, lush, sensuous, soothing, and comforting, telling us with extraordinary efficiency and immediacy that this studio is warm, cheerful, and relaxing. The paintings on the wall seem to float on this red field, popping up to the surface of the image and asserting themselves as objects of pride and accomplishment. Matisse similarly highlights his box of pencils, plate, flowers, and chair, personal objects that must have been special to him. Only by dispensing with conventional space and volume, meaning realism, could Matisse push these objects to the fore and make them so prominent. The flat red field also serves as a foil that allows Matisse to create a wonderful syncopated rhythm with the paintings and other objects, producing a vitality that suggests artistic creativity, which complements the peacefulness of the room. Without entirely dispensing with the representational world, Matisse has used an abstract vocabulary to convey his soothing message. TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 949 CUBISM The second major style to emerge in the new century was Cubism, largely under the leadership of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubism was not just an innovative style that sparked new ways of thinking about the look of art. It was also important because it introduced new ways of thinking about the purpose of art, which happened when its subject matter became not so much the still lifes and portraits that were embedded within Cubist abstraction but rather an analysis of the very language of painting. Picasso was the first to push the limits of the abstraction observed in the work of Cézanne, Derain, and Matisse. eflectin and Shatterin Tradition Les Demoiselles d Avignon Pablo Picasso (1881 1973) was born in the Spanish town of Malaga, on the Mediterranean coast, where he began his artwork under the direction of his father, who was a painter. At age 15, he moved to Barcelona and continued his training at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. He was soon a major figure in Barcelona s art community, working primarily in a Symbolist style. After roughly four years of shuttling back and forth between Barcelona and Paris and leading a desperate, abject existence, he settled permanently in Paris, moving into a run-down building nicknamed the ateaulavoir ( laundry boat ) in bohemian Montmartre, the rural hill overlooking the city. The neighborhood was a center for the impoverished cultural avant-garde, and Picasso quickly became part of the group s inner circle, which also included writers Max Jacob (1876 1944) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 1918). In 1907, Picasso shocked even his closest companions when he unveiled in his studio Les emoiselles d Avinon (The oun Ladies of Avinon) (fig. 27.5). The painting s style departed sharply from Picasso s previous work. To his contemporaries, this large, frightening picture seemed to come out of nowhere. Of course, the painting did not emerge from an aesthetic vacuum. Among Picasso s sources were the great French history 27.5 Pablo Picasso, Les emoiselles d Avinon (The oun Ladies of Avinon). 1907. Oil on canvas, 8' * 7'8" 2.44 * 2.34 m). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. 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P£«©¨£²£§ª¦² «¨°£²¦¢«°ª¤, ©°¥ «¨°£²¦¢«°ª¤ ¨£·ª§ £¡© £± ©°¥ A±¢ª¨¦§ ª§®¥¤¥§®¥§¨¥ ·£¸¥·¥§© ©°¦© ¬¥¦§ ª§ ©°¥ 19¿0«, «ª·ª²¦¢²³ ¦©©¦¨½¥® W¥«©¥¢§ «¨°£²» ¦¢«°ª¤. P¦¢©ª¨¡²¦¢²³ ª§±²¡¥§©ª¦² ¯¦« E®¯¦¢® S¦ª® « Orientalism µ197ò¶, ¯°ª¨° ¦¢¡¥® ©°¦© ©°¥ W¥«©¥¢§ ·ª§®, ¬¥¨¦¡«¥ ª© °¦® ¦²¯¦³« ¨£§«ª®¥¢¥® I«²¦·ª¨ ¨¡²©¡¢¥ ¦« ©°¥ ª§±¥¢ª£¢ £©°¥¢, ¨£¡²® §¥¸¥¢ ¢¥«¤£§«ª¬²³ ¢¥¤£¢© £§ N£¢©° A±¢ª¨¦ ¦§® ©°¥ N¥¦¢ E¦«©. paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the canvas he chose for the work is uncharacteristically large, consistent with the dimensions of a painting destined for the traditional Salon. And the nude was a classic academic subject. An antithetical and more immediate influence was the avant-garde work of Matisse, with whom Picasso maintained a friendly rivalry until the older artist s death in 1954. In the case of Les Demoiselles, he was responding to the spatial ambiguity of Matisse s Le Bonheur de Vivre, which Picasso felt compelled to upstage. These sources were not immediately apparent to visitors to Picasso s studio, and Les Demoiselles initially outraged Matisse and everyone else. But once understood, it provided inspiration for untold artists for decades to come. The title of the painting refers to the red-light district in Barcelona. Early studies show a sailor in a brothel, seated before a table with a plate of fruit and surrounded by prostitutes. In the final painting, the sailor is gone, but the theme remains, for we, the viewers, become the sailor seated at the table in front of the fruit, an age-old symbol of lust. Coming through the brothel curtains and staring directly at us are perhaps five of the most savage, confrontational nudes ever painted. Thematically, then, the picture began as a typical Symbolist painting about male lust and castrating women, a continuation of the femme fatale theme prevalent in late nineteenth-century art and literature, as well as a reflection of Picasso s personal sexual conflict with women and his intense fear of venereal disease. Instead of relying on conventional forms of pictorial narrative to tell his tale, Picasso allowed the abstract qualities of the medium to speak for him. For example, the formal qualities are threatening and violent, while the space is incoherent and jarring, virtually unreadable. The entire image is composed of what looks like enormous shards of glass that overlap in no comprehensible way. Instead of receding, they hover on the surface of the picture plane, jostling each other. 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I©« «ª·¤²ª±ª¨¦©ª£§ £± ±£¢·, ¨£²£¢, ²ª§¥, ¦§® ¨£·¤£«ª©ª£§ ¦§® ÄÅÆÅÇÈÊËÌ ËÍ ÌÎÈÏÄÎÐÊÑÒ ÓÎÄÎÐÐÅÐÅÔ ÔÅÕÅÐËÓÒÅÌÈÑ ËÇÇÏÄÄÊÌÖ ÊÌ ÎÕÎÌÈ×ÖÎÄÔÅ ØÙÚÛ ÜÝÙ ÞÝßà ØÙÚáÞÚÞ, Þâãå ØÞ PáãØÞÞÝ Øæç êáÙãåæàÙ, Úåà ëÝÙì ëØÞ íÙÝîØîïð ¦©©¢¦¨©ª¸¥ ±£¢ ª©« ¥Â¤¢¥««ª£§ª«©ª¨ ¼¡¦²ª©ª¥«, ¼¡¦²ª©ª¥« ©°¦© ©°¥³ ¤¥¢¨¥ª¸¥® ¦« ±¢ª°©¥§ª§, ¥¸¥§ ¬¦¢¬¦¢ª¨, ¦§® ©°¦© ¨£¡²® ¬¥ ª§¨£¢¤£¢¦©¥® ª§©£ ©°¥ª¢ ¯£¢½ ©£ ¥Â¤¢¥«« ¤£¯¥¢±¡² ¥·£©ª£§« ¦§® ¦ «©¢¦ª§¥® ¤«³¨°£²£ª¨¦² «©¦©¥. CHAP TER 27 TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 THE ART HISTORIAN S LENS The Myth of Primitivism 951 story seems logical enough. We know Matisse and Derain were already collecting African art, attracted to its abstract qualities and admiring how Africans had relinquished naturalism for the sake of expression. And Picasso and Matisse had known one another since 1905. Direct sources for Picasso s borrowings can be found in African sculpture, and the abstraction and barbarism of the masks must have appealed to the artist s sensibility. (See The Art Historian s Lens, page 951.) Picasso adamantly denied the influence at this time of art nègre, as African art was then called, although he would soon collect it himself. And, sure enough, in the early 1990s, art historians discovered that his source was possibly his own imagination, a claim based on doodlings in his sketchbooks that predate his exposure to African art. The striations, for example, were notational marks for shadow, while the head of the crouching demoiselle was actually the result of a witty transformation of a female torso into a face (visual double-entendres occur frequently in Picasso s art). But given Picasso s friendship with the Fauves, it is hard to imagine that he had not heard about and visited the Trocadéro Museum before he finished the painting. Regardless of his sources, what cannot be denied is Picasso s willingness to look anywhere for inspiration, from the lowly source of his own caricaturing to African masks (then considered artifacts and not art), to Classical Greek sculpture, reflected here by the tradition of the monumental nude, which Matisse had presented so differently in Le Bonheur de Vivre. But most important about Les Demoiselles is the new freedom it announced for painting, for now line, plane, color, mass, and void were freed from their representational role to take on a life all their own. The picture laid the foundation for Analytic Cubism. (Item not available in eText) Analytic Cubism: Picasso and Braque 457 27.6 Georges Braque, The Portuguese. 1911. Oil on canvas, *8 + (116 + 81.6 cm). Kunstmuseum, Basel. Gift of Raoul LaRoche, 1952 *8" 321 breast from the body. Even more incomprehensible is the seated figure below her, who has her back to us yet simultaneously faces us. The table with fruit is tilted at such a raking angle that it would shock even Cézanne, who provided the most immediate model for this spatial distortion (see fig. 26.3) and was the subject of a major retrospective in Paris in 1907. The menacingly pointed melon sets the shrill tone for the picture and through its unsubtle phallic erection announces the sexual theme. The use of conflicting styles within a single picture is another disturbing quality. The three nudes to the left with their almondshaped eyes and severe facial features were inspired by ancient Roman Iberian sculptures, which Picasso collected. But the frightening faces on the right are entirely different. At this point in the creation of the painting, or so the story goes, Picasso s Fauve friends took him to the Trocadéro Museum of ethnographic art, where he saw African masks, providing the source for the ski-jump noses, facial scarifications, and lopsided eyes. The 952 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D It may seem incredible that Les Demoiselles owes anything to the methodical, highly structured paintings of Cézanne, but Picasso had carefully studied Cézanne s late work and found in his abstract treatment of volume and space the basic units from which to derive the faceted shapes of what became Analytic Cubism. Picasso did not arrive at this style on his own, however, and even seemed creatively stalled after Les Demoiselles. To help him move beyond this point, the emotional Spaniard needed an interlocutor, a rational steadying force, someone with whom he could discuss his ideas and experiment. This intellectual partner was the French artist Georges Braque (1882 1963), who conveniently lived around the corner from him in Montmartre. From 1908 to 1910, the two fed off each other, their styles developing from representational pictures of fractured forms and space, as seen in Les Demoiselles, to shimmering evanescent mirages of abstract lines and brushwork, as found in Braque s 1911 painting The Portuguese (fig. 27.6). Picasso and Braque were so intertwined during this period that their styles began to merge by 1910. The Portuguese is a classic example of the Analytic Cubism that had emerged in 1910. Gone is the emotional terror and chaos of Les Demoiselles. Braque arranged a grid of lines following the shape of the canvas and an orderly geometric pattern of diagonal lines and curves, all recalling Cézanne s vision of a tightly structured world. Despite being abstract, however, these shapes also function as signs or hieroglyphs. The circle at the lower center is the sound-hole of a guitar, and the horizontal lines are the strings, although Braque used the same sign to indicate fingers, a confounding or visual punning of objects that is characteristic of Cubism and a declaration that art is a signing system, like language. The stenciled letters and numbers come from a poster that probably read Grand Bal and listed the price of admission (10 francs õ0 centimes). The lines and shadows suggest arms, shoulders, and the frontal or three-quarter pose of a figure that tapers toward the head. In the upper right, we see lines that suggest rope and a pier. By providing these subtle visual clues, Braque prompts the viewer to recognize that the painting shows a guitar player, in a Marseille bar, with a view of the docks through a window. As with Les ÷emsoiselles, we find a conventional subject a genre scene presented in a radical new artistic language. The light that floods the picture and falls on individual facets seems real or naturalistic but fails to create coherent space and volume. øùtimately everything is in a state of flux without absolutes, including a single interpretation of reality. The only reality is the pictorial world of line and paint, which Braque is telling us is as much a language as the hieroglyphic signs that he has embedded in his image. In a 1909 review of Braque s earlier work, Louis Vauxcelles, who had named Fauvism, labeled the paintings Cubism, influenced by Matisse s description of earlier Cubist works as appearing to be made of little cubes. The word was then applied to the analytic experiments of Braque and úicasso. front of, not behind, the canvas, a fact Édouard Manet had implied some 50 years earlier (see page 868). Collage completely changed the way in which Braque and úicasso made their images. Instead of breaking down or abstracting an object into essential forms, the artists now synthetically constructed it by building it up or arranging it out of cut pieces of paper, hence the name Synthetic Cubism. Constructing the image out of large, flat shapes meant that they could introduce into Cubism a variety of textures and colors, as seen in úicasso s Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass (fig. 27.7) of 1912. Because music is abstract, like their art, it became a favorite theme for the Cubists, who wished to establish parallels between the two art forms. úicasso built his composition on a background of real wallpaper that, like the imitation chair caning used earlier, serves as a visual pun on illusion and reality. úicasso puns with solid forms and intangible space as well. The guitar sound-hole, an element that should be negative space Synthetic Cuûismü The ýower of Collaþe To focus on structure, line, and space, úicasso and Braque painted monochrome images, thus removing the problem of color from their Analytic Cubism. This situation changed in 1912, however, when they began working in collage, pasting flat objects, generally paper, onto canvas. úicasso made the earliest known example in May 1912, when he glued onto the surface of a Cubist painting a sheet of imitation chair caning, a product not unlike contact paper. (These oilcloth sheets with a chair-caning pattern printed on them were normally pasted on wood as an inexpensive way to repair a broken seat.) This device allowed him to complicate notions of the real and the illusionistic, for the chair caning was simultaneously real a piece of real imitation chair caning and illusionistic, a picture of chair caning. Clearly, collage allowed úicasso to continue parsing the language of painting, úicasso and Braque realized immediately the broader implication of collage the pasted image now literally sat on top of the canvas, a statement Matisse had made a year earlier about painted imagery in The ÿed Studio when he revealed the canvas to emphasize how paint sat atop its surface. Once and for all, the Renaissance conception of the picture plane as a window into an illusionistic world was shattered. Instead of a window, the picture surface became a tray on which art was served. Art occurred in CHAP TER 27 P P ablo icasso, uitar Sheet Music and Wine lass. 1912. 27.7 Charcoal, gouache, and pasted paper, 2 5*8 + 181*2" (62.5 + 7 cm). The McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas. Bequest of Marion oogler McNay 4 4 K TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV O L UTION, 1904 1914 953 but appears as a solid circle of paper, contrasts with the wine glass in the Analytic Cubist drawing, which should be threedimensional and solid but instead consists of lines on a flat piece of off-white paper that has more physical presence than the drawn glass. icasso even tells us he is punning, for he has cropped the newspaper collage at the bottom to read LE JOU, a shortening of Le Journal, or newspaper, which in French sounds like the verb jouer, meaning to play. The headline for the article is La Bataille s est engagé, which translates as The Battle Has Started, and refers to the violent war then raging in the Balkans, with Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro fighting for independence against the Ottoman Empire (see map 27.1). icasso uses the announcement to signal the friendly rivalry between himself and Braque. ossibly, he is subtly contrasting the sensual pleasure of his still life and its implied comfortable bourgeois lifestyle with the horrendous suffering of the Balkan conflict, in effect commenting on French or middle-class indifference to the tragedy occurring to the east. The logical peak of Cubism occurred when icasso extended Synthetic Cubism to sculpture and created the first construction, a three-dimensional assemblage of materials. Although his earliest construction was made in 1912 (and evidence suggests Braque had made some even earlier), icasso did not produce a large number of these sculptures until 191 15. Most were musical instruments, such as Violin (fig. 27.8) of 1915. Instead of pasting paper onto canvas, he assembled flat or slightly bent sheets of painted metal into a low relief. Just as he had for painting, he now redefined sculpture. Instead of being carved, chiseled, or molded, his sculpture was assembled, and, unlike most sculpture since the Renaissance, it was painted. He used paint perhaps with a bit of irony, since the cross hatching used to represent shading in his paintings is unnecessary for a sculpture, the three-dimensional form not requiring illusionistic shadow. Again icasso puns with his medium as he comments on the language of art, describing the properties of sculpture and how it functions. While the subject of the work is a violin, we would never know this for certain were it not for the title. Recognizing a violin is not the issue, however, for icasso is more concerned with creating a visual equivalent to music here a staccato rhythm of shape, color, and texture that transforms the individual metal components into playful musical notes that we can almost hear. The outbreak of war in 191 disrupted daily life, bringing an end to the brilliant visual game between icasso and Braque. By then, the two artists had completely transformed painting and sculpture, undermining some 700 years of tradition by destroying notions about what art forms could be. Conventional systems for representing perspectival space were demolished, and now line and color conveyed formal or expressive content instead of serving to duplicate observed reality. Braque and icasso sparked a revolution in our perception of reality as radical as those of Freud and Einstein. Music and literature were undergoing similar transformations. For example, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882 1971) changed the face of music with his primitive, rhythmic ballet score The Rite of 954 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 8 ablo icasso, Violin. 1915. Construction of painted metal, 27. 371*2 + 255*8 + 71*2" (9 .5 + 65 + 19 cm). Musée icasso, aris Spring, first performed in 1913 in aris, where it caused a riot because people found it merely cacophonous noise that abandoned all musical rules. Irish author James Joyce (1882 191) similarly dismantled and restructured the novel in lysses, begun in 191, in which he disrupted the continuity of the narrative by giving a reader multiple views of the characters personalities and psychologies. Especially close to the Cubists, however, was the writer Gertrude Stein (187 196), who with her brother Leo amassed an astonishing collection of works by icasso and Matisse, which they displayed in their aris apartment. Stein is famous for such phrases as Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose or Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. Inspired by Cézanne, her novels and poems have a streamof-consciousness and fractured abstract quality meant to evoke the excitingness of pure being. Like Cubism, Stein s rhythmic word-paintings deny any absolutes. THE IMPACT OF FAUVISM AND CUBISM Matisse s and Picasso s liberation of color and line from illusionistic roles marked important steps in the development of modern art. As innovative as their achievements were, their interests and sensibilities during these years were limited. Their works were rational, intellectual, and pleasurable, and they focused on such traditional subjects as still life, portraiture, and the figure. Yet they provided a new artistic vocabulary for artists with very different interests and concerns, artists who used this new language to project powerful emotions, spirituality, and the intensity of modernity. German Expressionism The long tradition of Expressionism in German art extends back to the grotesque physical and psychological tensions of such enaissance artists as Matthias Grünewald (see fig. 18.10) and Albrecht Dürer (see fig. 18.14). German Expressionism surfaced as a cohesive movement toward 1905, and although it encompassed a range of issues and styles, it can be characterized as tortured, anguished, brutally primitive, or passionately spiritual, reflecting elemental cosmic forces. DIE BRÜCKE (THE BRID GE) (Item not available in eText) 27.9 Paula Modersohn-Becker, Selbstbildnis, Halbakt mit Bernsteinkette (Self-Portrait with an Amber Necklace). 1913. Oil on canvas, 24 + 193*4" (61 + 50.2 cm). Kunstmuseum, Basel CHAP TER 27 A precursor of the first German Expressionist movement is Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876 1907), whose career was cut short by her early death at the age of 31. Her artistic activity was limited to two mature years, during which she produced remarkable pictures that promised a brilliant future. In 1898, she settled in the commune of Worpswede, a haven for artists and intellectuals seeking escape from modern urban life, just outside Bremen in north Germany. There, she befriended two major Symbolist writers, the poet ainer Maria ilke (1875 1926) and the novelist Carl Hauptmann (1862 1946), both of whom urged her to seek the spiritual in her art and to reject the naturalistic. ModersohnBecker visited Paris regularly, and in 1905 06 she was especially influenced by exhibitions of works by Gauguin and Cézanne. The emergence of her individual style is represented by her 1913 Selbstbildnis, Halbakt mit Bernsteinkette (Self-Portrait with an Amber Necklace) (fig. 27.9). In this radical picture, the artist presents herself nude. With this gesture, Modersohn-Becker reclaims the nude female form for women, endowing it with a creative vitality and meaning that challenges the tradition of the passive nude Venuses and bathers popular since the enaissance. The artist presents herself as an emblem of fertility, an earth-goddess, from which all life flows. Showing herself frontally, like an icon, she reduces her contours to a Gauguin-like curvilinear simplicity. Her awkward yet charming pose suggests the primitive, recalling especially Gauguin s Tahitian women (see fig. 26.13). Her amber necklace even resembles a lei, or garland of flowers. She poignantly displays two small flowers, symbols of fertility, which she has colored and shaped similarly to her nipples, drawing a parallel between the two. Also symbolic of fecundity is the garden that she stands in. A celestial blue halo deifies her and reinforces her elemental presence. What is revealing about the image is Modersohn-Becker s German primitivism, which differs so radically from that of Gauguin. There is a cultivated crudeness throughout the picture, reflected in the pasty application of paint, particularly in the masklike face and neck, and the awkward gestures, especially of her left hand. It appears as well in the ungainly flat ear and coarse fingers of the right hand. Despite the beautiful, colorful palette, we sense a raw, primal energy and an earthiness, characteristics of much German Expressionism. Scholars generally assert that German Expressionism began with Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group conceived in 1903 when four Dresden architecture students, including Ernst Ludwig irchner (1880 1938) and Erich Heckel (1883 1970), decided to form an art alliance to clear a path for the new German art. In 1905, the group officially formed and went public with no artistic program other than to oppose older well-established powers and to create a bridge to the future. Like so many progressive Germans, their vision was formed by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900). In his most famous book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 85), Nietzsche called for the rise of an Übermensch, or superhuman, a youthful noble of superior intellect, courage, fortitude, creativity, and beauty who would dominate the inferior masses huddling TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 955 safely in the conventional, restrictive past. This strong-willed Übermensch would be the bridge that would lead the world into a glorious future of new ideas. The initial problem confronting these largely self-taught artists, who shared a communal studio in a former butcher s shop, was to find appropriate subject matter and a way to express it. Initially they focused on the unsettling psychology of modern Germany and turned to intense color to convey their message. irchner, the leader of Die Brücke, was perhaps the first to mature artistically, about 1907, as seen in his Street, Dresden (fig. 27.10) of 1908. The group s love of an Gogh and their recent discovery of Matisse are reflected in the intense Fauvist color liberated from a representational role. As important is the impact of Edvard Munch (see fig. 26.19), who exhibited throughout Germany and often resided in Berlin after 1892. The disturbing psychological undertones and arabesque patterning are decidedly Munch-like, and irchner s crowded street evokes a claustrophobic anxiety worthy of the Norwegian symbolist. Like most Munch images, this one focuses on sexual confrontation. Wraithlike women stare out. One, dressed in yellow, lifts her dress to reveal her petticoat. Searing pinks, yellows, and oranges contrast with electrifying blues and greens, creating a disturbing dissonance and sexual excitement. This picture could never be mistaken for a Matisse. For the Bridge artists, prostitutes were emblems of the decadence of urban life, embodying the immorality and materiality of the city. In 1906, the Berlin painter Emil Nolde (1867 1956) had a one-person show at the Galerie Arnold in Dresden. The Brücke artists were so captivated by Nolde s powerful use of color that they invited him to join the group. Older than the other members, ' 27.10 Ernst dwig irchner, Street, Dresden. 1908 (dated 1907 on painting). il on canvas, 111*4 + 6 67*8 (1.51 + 2 m). Museum of Modern Art, ew ork Y " ' " he lasted only a year, for his brooding nature and highly personal style were not really compatible with the group s communal mission. Still, his preoccupation with intense emotion and color conformed to the direction in which the group was heading, in part due to his influence. In 1909, after recovering from a serious illness, he made a series of religious pictures, including The Last Supper (fig. 27.11). olde claimed that in this picture he followed an irresistible desire to represent profound spirituality, religion, (Item not available in eText) 27.11 Emil Nolde, The Last Supper. 1909. Oil on canvas, 321*2 + 413*4" (86 + 107 cm). Kopenhagen Statens Museum for Kunst Wvz Urban 316 956 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D and tenderness. This painting, created in a passionate fervour over several days, is about emotion, his own as well as that of esus and the apostles. Nolde crowds the figures and presses them to the surface of the picture plane, making their passions ours. A somber yet ardent red dominates, contrasted by its complement green and laced with yellows and blues, making the surface appear to burn with emotion. He used bold slabs of paint to crudely construct faces and bodies, an effect difficult to see in reproductions. A brutal angularity occasionally appears in chins and noses, and color patterns have jagged edges, as in the hair of the foreground figures. At first the faces look like masks and are almost grotesque. These are not Ensor masks (see fig. 26.18), however, nor are they masks at all. The distortions and strident gestures, both figural and painterly, underscore the expressive power of the scene. The rawness of the figures, a quality we saw in Modersohn-Becker, enhances the direct emotional force. It also makes the protagonists appear more human and earthy, paradoxically more real despite their sketchiness. By this point in his career, Nolde regularly visited the Völkerkundemuseum in Berlin, drawn to the spirituality and expressionism of the tribal artifacts displayed there. Here, we can sense his adoption of the abstracting, simplification, and directness found in much African art and see him using it to create similar powerful psychological effects. The ranks of Die Brücke gradually expanded to eight or nine artists, but by 1909, the members began moving one by one to Berlin. There, they found a more sophisticated art scene, dominated by Herwarth Walden s avant-garde art publication Der Sturm, begun in 1910, a concept he had expanded into a gallery of the same name by 1911. By that year, all the Brücke artists had relocated, although the group did not disband until 1913. Heavily influenced by Cubism, their style began to change as well. Most abandoned the undulating contours of Munch and the ungendstil (German Art Nouveau) and embraced a fractured planarity and geometric linearity. This new style that emerged toward 1910 can be seen in Erich Heckel s A Crystal Day (fig. 27.12) of 1913. Although Die Brücke artists retained the linear look of Cubism, they generally used it to create psychological tension rather than a complicated pictorial space. In this work, Heckel uses Cubist line and fracturing of space to portray abstract, universal ideals. While irchner portrayed the psychologically debilitating and moralistically bankrupt side of modernity, Heckel presented the antidote, a Rousseauian elemental, almost primitive, unification with nature and its universal forces. In A Crystal Day, Heckel captures cosmic energy through the power of his long streaking lines that, especially in sky and lake, look like a painterly abstract Cubist composition. Similar asymmetrical jagged shapes are echoed throughout, locked in a tight mosaic. Even the angular figure, reduced to a simplified form and vaguely reminiscent of the African sculpture the group so admired for what it considered its primal directness, is closely woven into the linearity of the land. Heckel gives us the feeling of a common life force surging through all of nature, binding everything together. This reading is CHAP TER 27 27.12 Erich Heckel. A Crystal ay. 1913. Oil on canvas, 71*4 + 373*4" (120 + 96 cm). inakothek der Moderne, Munich. Loan from Collection of Max russ, Berlin confirmed by the clouds and their reflections in the water, which have been transformed into the crystals of the title and reflect the belief that crystals held spiritual properties, a perception popularized by the poet aul Scheerbart in 191 (see page 979). In their quest to create a nationalistic art, Die Brücke artists revived the printmaking technique of woodcut, favored by German artists during the early Renaissance. (See Materials and Techniques, page 958.) Adding to the medium s attraction was its expressive rawness one can sense the grain of the wood, which gives not only a stridency but also an earthly, organic feeling to the images. These qualities can readily be seen in irchner s eter Schlemihl: Tribulations of Love (fig. 27.13) of 1915, one of a series irchner created to illustrate the prose tale eter Schlemihl s Wondrous History (181) by Adelbert von Chamisso (1781 1838), which tells the tale of a man who sells his shadow, thus his soul, for a pot of gold. This colored woodcut shows the use of the ambiguous space of Cubism to project the invisible inner workings of the mind and to juxtapose that with the representational world. Here, we see a man next to a manifestation of his psychosexual conflict. Spatial dislocation, a splintering sharpness to the edges, a chaotic composition, and the touches of emotion-evoking color (a passionate violent red and a chilling melancholy blue) all abstract qualities create an unsettling and distressing image. TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 957 MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES The Woodcut in German Expressionism S ome of the best-known European artists in the fifteenth and six- emotional tensions. Unlike the division of labor characteristic in the teenth centuries practiced the printmaking medium of the wood- production of Japanese prints and in those of northern Renaissance cut, but by the early nineteenth century this method had been eclipsed artists such as Albrecht Dürer, these modern artists designed, cut, and by new commercial printing technologies, such as wood engraving and printed the woodcuts themselves. They could thus exploit unforesee- lithography. These technologies produced images of great detail that able expressive qualities in the wood grain that became evident only could be executed rapidly and mass-produced. In the late nineteenth during the carving process. Munch developed an influential technique century, however, European painters and sculptors returned to the in which he cut the block into jigsaw pieces that were inked woodcut as an artistic medium precisely because it produced a crude, individually, reassembled, and printed, resulting in a multicolor print unsophisticated look in contrast to the slick techniques of modern produced in one pull through the press. The Kirchner woodcut seen in image reproduction. figure 27.13 was printed from two blocks. Japanese woodblock prints were the elaborate product of a series of Although many prints by these artists appear spontaneous or per- designers, block cutters, and printers, and Europeans in the mid-nine- haps haphazard, they are in fact the result of deliberate forethought: teenth century avidly collected them. In the 1890s, Edvard Munch and The block had to be cut in such a way that the wood remaining in Paul Gauguin reinvented a very different form of the woodblock print, relief, when rolled with ink, produced the sought-after image. There or woodcut, as did such German Expressionists as Ernst Ludwig was no room for error, for the artist had not only to plan the positive Kirchner (see fig. 27.13) and, somewhat later, Käthe Kollwitz in the and negative spaces but also to reverse his intended picture because, early 1900s. Their simplified, hand-made process contributed to the when printed, the impression created is a mirror image of the original planar effect of flat, simplified shapes, which can evoke strong woodblock design. Kirchner, like Heckel, displays a Brücke reliance on the expressive distortions of African sculpture, seen especially in the sharp angularity and faceting of the man s face. The second major German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), developed in Munich, in southern Germany. It officially lasted but four months, from December 1910 to March 1911. Like their Brücke counterparts, the artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter drew on art forms from Western art history as well as nonWestern and folk-art traditions to create images that reveal their skepticism toward modern, industrial life. The group focused on expressing a spirituality they believed resided beneath the surface of the visual world. The key figure in Der Blaue Reiter was the Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky (1866 1944). He left Moscow in 1896 to study art in Munich and brought with him Russian influences, namely the spirituality of native religious icons and the robust, emotional colors of folk art. His interest in folk culture was rekindled when, in 1908, he moved with painter and partner Gabriele Münter (1877 1962) to Murnau, just south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps. There he immersed himself in folk culture and was deeply affected by the powerful colors and the directness of the folk decorations and paintings on glass, a medium that he and Münter adopted. DER BLAUE REITER (THE BLUE RIDE R) 27.13 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Peter Schlemihl: Tribulations of Love. 1915. Color woodcut from two blocks on wove paper, 131*8 + 81*4" (33.6 + 21.7 cm). National Gallery of Art and Brücke Museum. Collection of Karl and Emy Schmidt-Rottluff 958 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D When in Munich, the couple lived in the Schwabing neighborhood of Munich, a bohemian enclave of cafés and liberalism. The area was a breeding ground for explorations of spirituality and the occult, especially Theosophy, which was a daily topic of conversation for many. Kandinsky owned the book Theosophie by German philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861 1925) and attended his Theosophy lectures in Berlin in 1908. Inspired in part by Steiner s ideas, Kandinsky in 1910 wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published the next year and read worldwide. In it, he proclaimed the need to paint one s connectedness with the universe and to use an abstract vocabulary, one that functioned much like music, to portray the abstract qualities of spirituality. He wrote that color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul. (See Primary Source, page 960.) Because of this parallel with music, Kandinsky titled his works composition, improvisation, and concert. Kandinsky, a well-read intellectual, was also influenced by the recent scientific discoveries of Einstein and Rutherford, which demonstrated that matter was not solid and stable but instead existed in a state of flux, convincing Kandinsky that a spiritual force coursed through all matter. While Kandinsky advocated abstract art by 1910, it was not until 1911 that his own work became entirely nonobjective. In 1910, he began a series of ten paintings called Compositions. The first works were abstract but still readable, with objects reduced to simple childlike forms vaguely recognizable as figures, trees, horses, mountains, or churches, for example. (A rider on a horse, often blue, occasionally appears, the horse and rider motif being common in Kandinsky s oeuvre and often interpreted as a reference to the artist himself and his idol St. George, the Christian dragonslayer, and their parallel quest to bring a new spirituality into the world. As is apparent, the motif became the group s name.) In these 1910 paintings, forms are often reduced to flat color and encased in a dark line, the deeply saturated color and line resembling the spiritual stained glass of churches. The total abstraction that appeared in 1911 can be seen in his 1913 painting Sketch I for Composition VII (fig. 27.14). This was one of numerous preliminary studies for a large final version that 27.14 Vasily Kandinsky, Sketch I for Composition VII. 1913. Oil on canvas, 303*4 + 393*8" (78 + 100 cm). Felix Klee Collection CHAP TER 27 TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 959 PRIMARY SOURCE Vasily Kandinsky (1866 1944) From Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky hoped to inaugurate a new spiritual era for modern human beings through his art. These remarks first appeared in 1911. I f you let your eye stray over a palette of colors, you experience two things. In the first place you receive a purely physical effect, namely the eye itself is enchanted by the beauty and other qualities of color. You experience satisfaction and delight, like a gourmet savoring a delicacy. Or the eye is stimulated as the tongue is titillated by a spicy dish. But then it grows calm and cool like a finger after touching ice. These are physical sensations, limited in duration. They are retains some of the same compositional elements but has a different palette. While Kandinsky s hues still have the deep resonance of stained glass, the recognizable motifs of the earlier works are gone, yielding to an abstract play of color and painted line and form. The image may appear apocalyptic and chaotic, but these dynamic qualities are meant to capture the universal spiritual forces as the artist himself felt them. Despite the total abstraction, the image still feels like landscape it has a horizontal spread we associate with the genre, and there is still a feeling of recession due to overlapping forms. But this landscape can be read as cosmic as much as earthly, and it is so abstract it can even be interpreted as microcosmic as well (portraying a microscopic view of nature). superficial, too, and leave no lasting impression behind if the soul remains closed. And so we come to the second result of looking at colors: their psychological effect. They produce a correspondent spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the physical impression is of importance. Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul. It is evident therefore that color harmony must rest ultimately on purposive playing upon the human soul. Source: Vasily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, tr. Francis Golffing, Michael Harrison and Ferdinand Ostertag (NY: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947) Which is precisely Kandinsky s point since it is a picture of ubiquitous abstract mystical powers as the artist himself felt or experienced them. Franz Marc (1880 1916), who met Kandinsky in 1910 or 1911, shared many of the same objectives, especially the quest to portray spirituality. Both artists discussed how animals instinctively bonded with nature and thus with the cosmos. (This belief as well accounts for Kandinsky s repeated use of the horse and rider motif, which dates to 1903.) Marc claimed that animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me. This statement conveys a feeling shared by all the artists of Der Blaue Reiter: the belief that Western, industrialized society was (Item not available in eText) 27.15 Franz Marc, Animal Destinies (The Trees Showed Their Rings, The Animals Their Arteries). 1913. Oil on canvas, 6'41*2" + 8'7" (1.94 + 2.62 m). Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. 1739 960 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D spiritually bankrupt and therefore the need to return to nature. By 1911, Marc was interweaving animals, often horses, into tightly composed landscapes, and by early 1912, he was using Cubism to effect this instinctual interlocking of animal, nature, and primordial forces, as seen in Animal estinies (fig. 27.15) of 1913. In this work Marc has transformed Cubist facets into dynamic rays of light that seem to have passed through an unseen mystical crystal. The horses, foxes, and deer dissolve into these spiritual bolts of light, becoming one with them and a universal life force. A sense of a cataclysmic finale pervades the image, suggesting death, or the end of the life cycle, at which point living matter fulfills its destiny by being absorbed back into the cosmos. On the reverse of the canvas, Marc wrote, And all being is flaming suffering, suggesting the inevitability of a spiritual redemption and the innate ability of animals to accept this course. Marc s colors are the deep saturated hues of stained-glass windows, this reference to mystical illumination being reinforced by the illusionistic light streaming through the image. By 1911, er Blaue Reiter had dissolved. The group had two shows. The first was in the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich in cember 1911. It then toured Germany, often to harsh reviews, closing at er Sturm Galerie in Berlin. Clearly, the German viewing public was not ready to embrace the group s striking and abstracted images of nature, despite the works evocation of traditional art forms such as stained-glass windows and religious icons. The second exhibition featured works on paper and was mounted at a Munich bookstore. erhaps more important than their exhibitions was the er Blaue eiter Almanac (The Blue ider ear!ook), which included members work along with reproductions of examples of Egyptian, Gothic, Asian, tribal, and folk art. Even works by children found a place in the ear!ook. Further enhancing the publication s eclecticism was an article on the spirituality of music by the great tonalist composer and Theosophist Arnold Schönberg (187# 1951), who was also a painter and member of er Blaue Rieter. The ear!ook was in effect a catalogue of art that was simple, direct, and spiritual art that Kandinsky and Marc believed tapped into the cosmos and shared their own goals. One artist whose long career touched on many of the elements expressed in the The Blue ider ear!ook is the Swiss painter aul Klee (1879 19#0). Officially, Klee was only minimally involved with er Blaue Reiter. He had come to Munich in 1898 to study painting and had settled there in 1906. On friendly terms with Kandinsky and other members of er Blaue Reiter, Klee s understanding of Expressionism and other modern art movements came from his travels throughout Europe, although no voyage had a more decisive effect on him than a two-week trip to Tunisia. As had been the case with elacroix and Monet the century before, the bright light and color of $orth Africa overwhelmed Klee. Soon after arriving, he wrote in his diary, Color has taken hold of me. That is the meaning of this happy hour% Color and I are one. I m a painter. But equally important for his development was his connection to PAUL KLEE CHAP TER 27 - . aul Klee, The iesen. 1915. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 27.16 71*8 + 91*2" (17.7 + 26 cm). Hermann and Marguerite Rupf-Stiftung r Blaue Reiter, for his art was the most comprehensive amalgam of all the sources listed in the ear!ook, especially children s art, tribal art, and music. (Klee himself was an accomplished flutist.) Klee s new Tunisia-inspired palette appears in The &iesen (fig. 27.16) of 1915. Combined within the grid of Cubism is an abstract use of color reminiscent of Matisse and Kandinsky. The image echoes the directness and naïveté of children s and folk art, as well as the luminescent, saturated colors of stained-glass windows, the white of the paper flickering through the transparent watercolor to create a glowing illumination. We instantly sense the spirituality that is the foundation of this picture and almost feel as though we can retrace Klee s steps in its creation. The triangular mountain, the $iesen, dominates the image, its rock-hard geometry providing a sense of permanence and eternity while reflecting the Theosophical belief in the spirituality of the triangle, which represents, among other things, the mystical correspondence of the universe. The night sky is filled with religious symbols, such as the (ewish Star of )vid and the Islamic crescent moon, which mingle with primitive hieroglyphic suns. The branches of the sole tree, suggesting life and all living things, rhythmically correspond to the rays emanating from the stars and suns above and are further linked to them by the $iesen, the shape of which powerfully connects earthly elements with cosmic ones. Through their color, the rectangular planes in front of the mountain evoke trees and plants, light, sun, fire, sky, and earth. *+ing an abstract vocabulary of color and shape, into which are inserted a handful of representational signs, Klee has stripped away everything inessential. He reveals in a poetic, understated way his innermost feelings about the nature of life and the universe. Or as he himself said, Art does not render the visible; rather it makes visible. Adding to the charm and intimacy of Klee s art is its small scale and childlike draftsmanship. TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 961 Austrian Expressionism Another major center for Expressionism was Vienna. Home of Sigmund Freud, it was an especially repressive city, socially and culturally dominated by a conservative bourgeoisie and an aloof aristocracy resistant to change. In reaction, many avantgarde artists led bohemian lifestyles, shunning middle-class morals and standards. Not surprisingly, Viennese artists generated some of the era s most neurotic and disturbing visual imagery, their art reflecting their psychic distance from conventional society. Perhaps the most prominent Viennese Expressionist is Oskar Kokoschka (1886 1980), who entered the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts in 1905 and specialized in portraiture. In 1908, he exhibited with Gustav Klimt (see page 921) and other avant-garde artists at the Vienna Kunstschau, an exhibition for modern art, where his violent portraits, inspired by Van Gogh, generated so much controversy he was expelled from OSKAR KOKOSCHKA art school. Kokoschka called his expressionistic portraits black portraits, and the sitters appeared to be so troubled that he became known as the Freud of painting who paints the dirt of one s soul. Kokoschka described his process similarly: From their face, from the combination of expressions and movement, I tried to guess the true nature of a person, recreating with my own pictorial language, what would survive in the memory. The following year, Kokoschka produced an exceptionally violent and sexual stage play, in the process capturing some of the deepest passions of the mind. The reaction to the play was so negative Kokoschka was forced to flee Vienna, going to Berlin for two years before returning. We can get a sense of how expressionistic his portraits looked from the figures in The Bride of the Wind (fig. 27.17), Kokoschka s 1914 self-portrait with his lover Alma Mahler, the notoriously beautiful and sophisticated widow of the famous Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860 1911). By 1914, their passionate relationship was threatened, and it ended the following year. The Bride of the Wind reflects the artist s distress. Originally, 27.17 Oskar Kokoschka, The Bride of the Wind. 1914. Oil on canvas, 5'111*4" + 7'25*8" (1.81 + 2.20 m). Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland 962 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D /okoschka intended to disguise this personal dilemma by calling the work Tristan and Isolde, after Wagner s opera about two tragic lovers. The final title comes from Georg Trakl (1887 1910), a bohemian Viennese poet who produced morbid and nightmarish work. /okoschka expresses his anxiety through coarse, violent brushstrokes and a seething, swirling composition. Oblivious to this turmoil, Mahler is shown peacefully sleeping, while /okoschka restlessly worries, his body transformed into a flayed corpse, his hands grotesquely gnarled. The couple are contained in a monstrous shell-like cradle adrift in a landscape that is bleak, uncontrollable, and subject to cosmic forces, as suggested by the gravitational pull of a distant moon. This lunar force seems to represent a Freudian sexual drive, for the moon is recessed in a vaginalike tube and framed by phallic peaks. The bizarre environment seems liquid and insubstantial, the entire image transformed into a threatening quagmire of paint and representing psychological urges and instability. SCHIELE Egon Schiele (1890 1918), another major Viennese painter, likewise defied bourgeois mores. He watched his father s painful death from syphilis, which probably accounts in part for his preoccupation with sickness and mortality. He then feuded bitterly with his conservative middle-class uncle in order to become an artist. He attended the Vienna Academy of Fine Art, and Gustav /limt soon took him under his wing. At /limt s invitation, Schiele exhibited at the same 1908 and 1909 Vienna 1unstschau exhibitions as /okoschka. He soon dropped out of art school and with friends established yet another secessionist organization, the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group). Inspired by /limt s defiance toward bourgeois conservatism, he led a bohemian life, and in 1911 fled Vienna with his mistress to live in nearby small villages. Schiele s art is dominated by images of nudes of himself, prostitutes, and lovers and although he worked in oil, many of his finest works are on paper, such as Self23ortrait 5Man Twistin6 Arm Around Head7 (fig. 27.18) of 1910. The nude had dominated Western art since antiquity, but Schiele s presentation of the unclothed body departs from the tradition of the heroic male nude introduced in Classical antiquity and revived in the Renaissance. Here instead is an outright affront in its frank presentation of the body and its sickly and grotesque distortions. Schiele made the drawing most likely just after his uncle had cut him off financially, and it seems to represent the conflict between conformist bourgeois guardian and independent bohemian painter. Schiele is defiant, not only in his demonic glare and bold, contorted gestures but also in his willingness to present himself as disfigured and ghoulish. However, we also sense an element of self-scrutiny. The 20-year-old artist reveals ribs, underarm hair, and nipple. We sense the body s skeleton, its physicality, and, despite the confrontational stare, its vulnerability. Schiele s evocative handling of the medium, the velvety quality of the charcoal and splashes of watercolor, reinforce the sensuality of the flesh exposed to deterioration, one of the work s dominant themes. 9ust as his career was taking off in 1918, Schiele fell victim to the EGON CHAP TER 27 FH E M Q S Egon Schiele, Self ortrait Man Twistin Arm Around Head . 27.1 1910. Watercolor, gouache and charcoal on paper, 173*4 + 121*2" 5 + 31.75 cm). rivate collection, New ork TX Z [ pandemic influenza that killed 20 million people worldwide, including his pregnant wife who died three days before him. Cu<ism after =icasso and Bra>ue? =aris In France, Cubism was thoroughly entrenched by 1911 12, expanding well beyond @icasso and Braque. A handful of individual painters had closely followed @icasso s and Braque s developments in 1909 10, and in late 1910 they began exhibiting together at the large @aris Salons and at a private gallery, calling themselves the Section d Or (Golden Section). Original members Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, 9ean Metzinger, and Henri Le Fauconnier were soon joined by Fernand Léger, Roger de La Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, and his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon. In 1912, Gleizes and Metzinger published Au CuCisme (CuCism), the first book on the subject. TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV O L UTION, 1904 1914 963 Of this group, Robert Delaunay (1885 1941) was among the most influential. Unlike concurrent Analytic Cubist works by Braque and Picasso, Delaunay s 1910 Cubist paintings of the Eiffel Tower, an icon of modern technology, incorporated color, reflecting the artist s background as a Neo-Impressionist toward 1905. They also differed in their subject: the movement and energy of modernity and the constant flux of the contemporary world. Delaunay s preoccupation with the dynamism of the modern world is evident in his 1914 Homage to Blériot (fig. 27.19), honoring the French aviator Louis Blériot (1872 1936), inventor of the single-wing airplane and the first person to fly across the English Channel. Delaunay integrates emblems of the modern world airplanes, propellers, and the Eiffel Tower into a Cubist composition that is a kaleidoscope of floating balls and rotating disks suggesting whirling propellers and blazing suns. He creates movement not only through the shifting forms of Cubist space but also through the use of what Delaunay called simultaneous contrasts, the placement of flat planes of primary and secondary colors next to one another, not only creating movement but also light and space, none of which is illusionistic. Two years before, Delaunay had exhibited total abstractions called Simultaneous Disks or Simultaneous Contrasts, paintings consisting entirely of the multihued concentric circles seen in Homage to Blériot. While Delaunay s color theory was derived ROBERT DELAUNAY (Item not available in eText) \ obert Delaunay, Homage to Blériot. 1914. Tempera on canvas, 27.19 8'21*2" + 8'3" (2.5 + 2.51 m). ffentliche unstsammlung Basel, unstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. Emanuel Hoffman Foundation. (1962.6) ] 964 PA RT I V Ö ] T H E M O D ER N W O R L D from that of the nineteenth-century color theorist Michel-Eugène Chevreul (see page 874), his move into total abstraction was prompted by his contact with Marc and Kandinsky, who included him in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition. Some of these abstract paintings contain overlapping circles, suggesting a relationship among spheres in space, a reading reinforced by the subtitle Sun and Moon. The critic Guillaume Apollinaire, in his review of the 1913 Salon des Indépendants, even drew a parallel between Delaunay s paintings of simultaneous disks and music when he labeled his abstract work Orphism, a reference to the mythological lyre player Orpheus. But despite numerous parallels with Kandinsky, Delaunay s interests lay in depicting modernity and using an abstract vocabulary of simultaneous contrasts of color to create space, light, and movement, especially the fast tempo of a modern world of trains, planes, automobiles, electricity, telephones, and movies. Italian Futurism: The Visualization of Movement and Energy In January 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876 1944), a freeverse poet based in Milan, launched the Futurist movement when he published his Manifesto of Futurism, a pamphlet sent to thousands of artists and poets. On February 20, it appeared on the front page of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. Marinetti called for a rebirth of Italy, a country he saw as mired in the dusty, anachronistic Classical past. He advocated an uncompromising acceptance of modernity in all its manifestations, including electricity, automobiles, and machines, writing that all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed. (See www.myartslab.com.) For Marinetti, Futurism was a continual process, a permanent revolution. As soon as one change is effected, a new one must begin. Artists were no longer the manufacturers of a high-end product for a wealthy clientele, but rather they were vital forces operating within the community and influencing such daily concerns as fashion, games, toys, graphics, interior design, sports, food, and behavior. Marinetti toured Italy, enrolling artists, musicians, playwrights, architects, and designers into his movement. He arranged Futurist soirées, where from a stage he expounded upon his theories, often provoking, if not insulting, the audience in his attempt to incite them to action or even violence, which Marinetti perceived as socially cleansing and productive. Marinetti was intent on generating constant activism, which he saw as the conduit for the cultural risorgimento, or rebirth, of Italy. After a 1909 lecture in Milan presented to the avant-garde art group Famiglia Artistica (Artistic Family), Marinetti enlisted a handful of its members, including Umberto Boccioni (1882 1916), to become Futurists. In 1909, these artists were mostly Neo-Impressionists who transformed the color and energy of Divisionism to portray the dynamism of modernity. Their manifesto claimed that Motion and light destroy the materiality of bodies and that their concern would be the visualization of k lm mberto Boccioni, States of Mind Farewells. 1911 (second version). Oil on canvas, 28 + 377*8" (70.7 + 96 cm). 27.20 Museum of Modern Art, New ork. Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller p movement and energy. For their visual vocabulary, they rejected anything redolent of Classical Italian culture and instead turned to science^ the motion studies of Marey and Muybridge (see page 9_0), Ernst Mach s graphic representations of shock waves, and Wilhelm `onrad Röentgen s x-rays, which, like Rutherford s discovery of the structure of the atom, proved the physical world was not stable but in constant flux. Much like Seurat, they wanted to create a new artistic language based on science, but without prescribing any one style. Their goal was to capture the intensity of movement physical, psychological, and universal. In effect, they wanted to visualize Bergson s alan vital. Initially following Marinetti s lead, the Futurists were activists. By the end of 1911, however, they had become disenchanted with Marinetti s politics and instead chose to concentrate on art. More important, they turned from Neo-Impressionism to Cubism in their search for aesthetic direction. Their interest in Cubism, however, departed from the concerns of Braque and eicasso because the Futurists wanted to convey motion, dynamic energy, and social progress. After visiting earis and seeing Cubist CHAP TER 27 works in 1911, Boccioni painted States of Mind fh Farewells (fig. 27.20). Embedded in a fractured world of Cubist facets is an eruption of steam, sound, moving objects, and psychic energy. The white curving lines over the locomotive reflect Mach s lines of thrust, whereas the repetition of the vaguely rendered greentinted embracing couple is inspired by Muybridge s motion sequences. Boccioni is championing not just modern technology, as represented by the train, electric railroad signals, and trussed steel towers, but the perpetual movement of all objects and energy. In a May 1911 lecture in Rome, he proclaimed that painting had to capture the energy in all matter, energy in perpetual motion that dissolves the object while fusing it with surrounding space, an effect he called plastic dynamism. In States of Mind fh Farewells, we sense not only the dematerialization of the train and figures through time and movement, in part created by Boccioni s application of Divisionism, but also the simultaneous presence of space as something plastic and as vital as form. Swirling throughout the chaotic image is also an emotional energy a sense of painful separation and disappearance which TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 965 Bolshevik) Revolution was led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 192}), marking the first officially Communist-led revolution of the twentieth century, the change it brought about was far more radical than it had been in eighteenth-century America or France. The transformation in Russia was so revolutionary that it even embraced equality for women, who had proved integral to developing the radical art of the preceding years. THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE In Moscow, Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, two of the greatest collectors of contemporary art, made available to Russian artists their extraordinary holdings of works by Matisse and |icasso, among other vanguard artists. In response to these works and to growing ties with the western European avant-garde, Russian artists began to explore Cubism and other approaches to abstraction. In 1910, a group of Russian artists formed an avant-garde art association called the ~ack of Diamonds to support exhibitions of experimental work. Two years later, a splinter group, The Donkey s Tail, emerged. The latter especially was modeled on the Futurists. These groups embraced the modern, emphasizing the machine and industry, both critical to bringing Russia into the twentieth century. One of the outstanding painters in this avant-garde circle was Lyubov |opova (1889 192}), who studied in |aris in 1912 and in Italy in 191}, experiencing first hand the latest developments in Cubism and Futurism. These influences are reflected in The Traveler (fig. 27.22) of 1915. In this depiction of a woman wearing a yellow necklace and holding a green umbrella, |opova combines the fracturing of Cubism with the energy and movement of Futurism. By 1913, many of the Russian artists were calling themselves Cubo-Futurists, a term coined by azimir Malevich (1878 1935) that reflects the dual origins of the style. Malevich had exhibited with both the ~ack of Diamonds and The Donkey s Tail. In 1913, he designed Cubo-Futurist costumes and sets for what was hyped as the First Futurist Opera and titled Victory over the Sun. |resented in St. |etersburg, this radical opera embraced the principle of aum, a term invented by progressive Russian poets. Essentially, aum was a language based on invented words and syntax, the meaning of which was supposedly implicit in the basic sounds and patterns of speech. The poets intention was to return to the nonrational and primitive base of language that, unencumbered by conventional meaning, expressed the essence of human experience. In Victory over the Sun, performers read from nonnarrative texts often consisting of invented words while being accompanied by the clatter of an out-of-tune piano. Malevich s geometric costumes and sets were equally abstract. A stack of triangles ran up and down the legs of one costume, while one backdrop was a square divided in half to form two triangles, one white, the other black. KAZIMIR MALEVICH mberto Boccioni, ni ue Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913 27.21 (cast 1931). Bronze, 37*8 + 3 7*8 + 153*4" (111. + 88.6 + 0 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New ork. Acquired through the Lillie . Bliss Bequest. (231.19 8) the title reveals as a theme of the work. This plastic dynamism, or the fusing of object and space, is evident in Boccioni s sculpture vniwue Forms of Continuity in Space (fig. 27.21) of 1913. The pointed forms trailing off legs and torso capture the direction of the energy, as if the displaced space were itself worn like a mantle. CuxoyFuturism and Suprematism in zussia Of all the major European countries in the 1910s, Russia was the least industrialized. Nevertheless, it became an important center for avant-garde art. Most of the population were serfs ruled by an indifferent czar and dominated by the Orthodox Church. Despite a recent rush to modernize and become a world power, Russia in some respects remained trapped in the Middle Ages. In a culture dominated by folk-art and icon-painting traditions, how did radical art emerge{ |art of the explanation may lie in the country s desperate need for reform. When, in 1917, the October (or 966 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 27.22 Lyubov opova, The Traveler. 1915. Oil on canvas, 56 + 11*2" (1 2.2 + 105. cm). Norton Simon Art Foundation, asadena, California CHAP TER 27 TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 967 PRIMARY SOURCE Kazimir Malevich (1878 1935) From The Non-Objective World Kazimir Malevich first published The Non-Objective World in 1919 in the catalogue for the 10th State Exhibition in Moscow. Here, he emphasizes how nonobjective art represents feeling, not objects, as it strips away all of the accumulations of civilization to get at the essence of existence, much as so-called primitive artists do. U nder Suprematism I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creating art. Hence, to the Suprematist, the appropriate means of representation is always the one which gives fullest possible expression to feeling as such and which ignores the familiar appearance of objects. Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving the world of will and idea, in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed. But a blissful sense of liberating non-objectivity drew me forth into and so feeling the desert, where nothing is real except feeling became the substance of my life. This was no empty square [referring to the Black Square] which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of non-objectivity. The black square on the white field was the first form in which non-objective feeling came to be expressed. The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling. The Suprematist square and the forms proceeding out of it can be likened to the primitive marks (symbols) of aboriginal man which represented, in their combinations, not ornament but a feeling of rhythm. Suprematism did not bring into being a new world of feeling, but, rather, an altogether new and direct form of representation of the world of feeling. Source: Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World, tr. Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: Theobald, 1959) 27.23 Kazimir Malevich. Installation photograph of the artist s paintings in 0, 10 (Zero Ten): The Last Futurist Exhibition. St. Petersburg, December 1915 It took Malevich two years to realize the implications of zaum for his art. In 1915, after working in a Cubo-Futurist style similar to Popova s, Malevich presented 39 nonobjective geometric paintings in a St. Petersburg exhibition entitled 0, 10 (Zero Ten): The Last Futurist Exhibition (fig. 27.23). The best-known work in the show is Black Square, seen in the installation photograph hanging in the manner of a Russian icon across the corner of a room. Malevich labeled his new work Suprematism. In his 1919 Suprematist treatise The Non-Objective World, Malevich explained that Suprematism refers to the supremacy of feeling. (See Primary Source, above.) This feeling is not just personal or emotional but revelatory, for the abstract essence of the world is 968 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 27.24 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying. 1915 (dated 1914). Oil on canvas, 227*8 + 19" (58 + 48.3 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with the funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange). (248.1935) translated into painting using an entirely new abstract language, stripped of any vestiges of realism. ike his fellow Russian Kandinsky, Malevich was a mystic, searching for cosmic unity, even a utopian world, as did supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. lack Suare embodies both the legacy of simple, otherworldly Russian icons and the mysticism of folk art. Its simple black form is as iconic as a frontal Madonna or saint, with the white ground extending off the four sides and projecting a sense of infinity. Malevich s abstract language included different geometric shapes and colors. In Suprematist Composition Airplane lying (fig. 27.24), also painted in 1915, he used red, yellow, and blue shapes in addition to black to create a sensation of movement and floating. Color, size, and shape produce a unique rhythm against the white ground. From one composition to the next, Malevich altered the rhythm by changing these formal characteristics. Although the title includes the word airplane and suggests an infatuation with technology, the image itself relates to the experience of air travel and the new relationship to the universe brought about by this mode of transportation. fortunately, reproductions of Malevich s paintings almost never show their organic quality. The shapes in Airplane lying may appear to be hard-edged, geometric, and machine-made, but in person one can see that their boundaries waver ever so slightly and there is a sense of a human hand applying paint to canvas. Malevich s paintings contain the same human presence, even if not as overtly stated, that is evident in the work of Kandinsky. And like Kandinsky, Malevich, through his white ground which evokes infinity, suggests a connection with the universe. Cuism an antasy arc Chagall an iorgio e Chirico Marc Chagall, I an the Village. 1911. Oil on canvas, 27.2 6 35*8" + 111*2" (1.92 + 1.51 m). Museum of Modern Art, ew ork. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund Malevich reduced Cubist geometry to the point that Cubist structure itself disappeared. Fellow Russian Marc Chagall (1887 1985), however, embraced Cubist composition in many of his works and remained a representational artist. With its ability to juxtapose and integrate the most disparate objects, Cubism was a perfect tool for creating dreamlike fantasy worlds. Chagall grew up in the ewish quarter of Vitebsk, and his paintings evoke his memories of the simpler times, values, and rituals that he had experienced in the shtetl. In 1910, Chagall moved to aris, where he immediately converted to Cubism, as seen in I an the Village (fig. 27.25) of the following year. But this dream image is hardly a Cubist intellectual dissection of form. sing the saturated colors of a stained-glass window and the simple shapes of Russian folk art, Chagall conjures up the most elemental issues of life itself. Man and animal are equated in almost mirrorlike symmetry, and the translucent, ephemeral quality of their heads makes the scene appear ethereal and mystical. The circular composition suggests the cycle of life, with birth as the blooming bush and death as the farmer carrying a scythe. Or it could be interpreted as the four seasons. Chagall did not explain his works and adamantly denied they had any links to storytelling or fairy tale. Instead his dreamscapes are a Cubist kaleidoscope of objects and incidents evoking the most elemental issues of life and often embedded in a wondrous fairy-tale scene that has powerful psychological repercussions. Arriving in aris at virtually the same moment as Chagall was the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888 1978). While studying in Munich from 1905 to 1909, de Chirico was heavily influenced by German Symbolist artists, the Theosophy of Schopenhauer, and the philosophy of Friedrich ietzsche, who described life as a foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed. He moved to Italy in 1909, settling in Florence in 1910, where, influenced by the strong southern light of Italy and the arcades of the iazza Santa Croce, he made the first of his Metaphysical Town Squares, images of an empty piazza formed by austere buildings rendered as bold simple forms and carefully delineated by strong line. His compositions and use of space became increasingly complex after his arrival in aris in 1911, as CHAP TER 27 TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 969 seen in his 191 Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (fig. 27.26), made after his permanent return to Italy in 191. His reliance on strong diagonal lines, such as the receding buildings and shadows, and his use of unstable disjointed space make his works vaguely echo Cubism. And yet de Chirico s pictures are stylistically conventional, even suggesting stage sets. ¡like his Futurist compatriots, de Chirico idolized rather than rejected the Classical past, although he subverted its austere authority by evoking a Romantic melancholy, using ominous shadows, intense light, and skewed perspective to create an unsettling eeriness. In Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, railroad tracks, darkened windows and arches, the empty van, and the girl with the hoop seem to be symbols, but de Chirico provides no clues about their meaning, insisting none existed. Instead, the painting offers a dreamscape, one with a poetic mood and wide open to interpretation. De Chirico called his work Metaphysical ¢ainting, revealing the reality underlying the appearance of things. As we shall see in the next chapter, his psychologically provocative poetic reveries would serve as a springboard for representational Surrealism in the coming decade. MARCEL DUCHAMP AND THE ADVENT O £ AN ART O £ IDEAS Along with ¢icasso and Matisse, Marcel Duchamp (1887 1968) played a major role in defining the art of the first half of the century, his influence then surging in the second half to the point that he almost singlehandedly molded post-1950 art. His great contribution was declaring that art was as much about ideas, thus residing in the mind, as it was about the beauty of what can be seen, thus of the retina. Realizing that ¢icasso and Braque, among others, were calling into question the meaning of art as they made the very nature of art visible, Duchamp took their development one step further by looking at the cerebral rather than formalist components of art and calling into question its very status as art by asking¤ What is art, and how does art function¥ Working in ¢aris in the 1910s, Duchamp quickly digested Impressionism and ¢ost-Impressionism. Toward 1911, he took on Cubism, as seen in ¦ude §escendin¨ a Staircase© ¦oª « (fig. 27.27), which he attempted to exhibit at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants. » Giorgio de Chirico, 27.2 Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. 191 . Oil on canvas, 3 1*4 + 281*2" (87 + 72. cm). rivate collection ½ º70 ¬®¯ °± ¯²³ ´µ¶³®· ¸µ®¹¶ ¼ ¼ ¼ Duchamp underscores the way in which words become an integral part of an artwork, going so far as to paint the title on the front of the work. With this gesture, Duchamp makes an important move in his exploration of the essence of art. A title, which defines a work, circumscribes its meaning, and also serves as a tool for remembering the work, fulfilling a role as important as the artwork itself. Here, then, Duchamp makes plain the inseparability not only of artwork and title, but of visual and linguistic experience. Duchamp s machinelike figure was not unique for 1912. By then, the theme was becoming commonplace in Cubist art, reflecting the era s worship of technology as a symbol of modernity and science s ability to improve the world. For example, Duchamp s older brother, Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876 1918), was a Cubist sculptor who on occasion rendered living forms as machines, as in Horse (fig. 27.28). Initial drawings show a realistic horse, but the final sculpture is an abstract monument to horsepower: The body has become a tapering cylinder with the tension of a coiled spring, and the legs look like thrusting pistons. Cubist facets and geometry have been ordered into an animal of twisting dynamism. Duchamp-Villon s horse, like most other mechanomorphic figures from the period, underscores the import role of industry in fashioning the modern age. In contrast, Marcel Duchamp s mechanical nude is humorous, sarcastic, and sacrilegious. 27.27 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. 1912. Oil on canvas, 58 × 35" (147 × 90 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. 1950 134-59 The hanging jury, which included some of his friends and even his two brothers, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Jacques Villon, found the painting neither serious nor Cubist enough, so Duchamp withdrew it. The work began as an illustration for a poem that described a figure ascending a stairway to the stars. Ever the iconoclast, Duchamp portrayed a nude figure, mechanical-looking and grandly descending a staircase, as he described it, More majestic you know, the way it s done in music halls. Duchamp was fascinated by Marey s chronophotographs, which inspired the sequential movement of his nude. Because one needs to know the title to understand that the figure is unclothed, CHAP TER 27 27.28 Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Horse. 1914 original, 1955 57 version from an edition of seven. Bronze, 39 × 24 × 36" (99 × 61 × 91.4 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Margaret Fisher in memory of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Walter L. Fisher. (1957.165) TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 971 later labeled his sculpture an Assisted Readymade, because he had combined two found objects a witty challenge to the notion that art involved only technical skill and craft. As important, he demonstrated that context determines the meaning of art, since by uniting these disparate objects, taking each out of its normal context and putting it in a new one, he gave each component of his sculpture a new meaning. Actually, Bicycle Wheel is so enigmatic it provokes wild interpretations, demonstrating that the meaning of a work of art also comes from viewers who bring their experiences to bear on the work. To an art historian, for example, the stool may suggest a pedestal and the wheel a head, an interpretation that can be seen as a clever engagement with artistic tradition, evoking the countless sculpted portrait busts that line museum galleries. A cyclist or a barfly most likely would come up with an entirely different scenario for the piece. Duchamp was adamant that his Assisted Readymades had no aesthetic value. The act of combining stool and wheel, placing each in a new context, was more important to him than the resulting object. Duchamp made two other Assisted Readymades prior to World War I; none was exhibited. Only during the war years was his revolution fully unleashed on the art world, as we shall see in the next chapter (see page 986). But it is important to introduce Duchamp as prewar artist, for although he became a major figure in the Dada movement, which arose in large part as a reaction to World War I, it must be understood that his revolutionary art was not initially made as a political and social statement but rather as an artistic one that came on the heals of the investigations of ¾icasso and Braque. CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI AND THE BIRTH O Á MODERNIST SCULPTURE Æ 27.29 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel. 1913 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913). Assemblage metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool, 501*2 + 251*2 + 165*8" (128.3 + 6 .8 + 2.2 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New ork. The Sidney and Harriet anis Collection. 595.1967 a-b Ç Ê È È Ë The following year Marcel Duchamp s humorous inquiry into the nature of art culminated in a revolution as monumental as ¾icasso s Les ¿emoiselles d AviÀnon. Duchamp placed a bicycle wheel upside down on a stool (fig. 27.29) and declared it art. He Å 97 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D Like ¾icasso s constructions and Duchamp s Assisted Readymades, the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi (1876 1957) were among the most innovative artworks being produced before the war. Indeed, Brancusi s work is so minimal-looking and abstract it has come to symbolize modern sculpture itself. Ironically, Brancusi s background could not have been more removed from the modern world. The son of Romanian peasants, he grew up herding sheep in the remote village of Tîrju-Âiu in the Carpathian mountains. The region had a long tradition of ornate folk carving, in which Brancusi excelled. After studying art in Bucharest and passing through Munich in 1903, he settled in ¾aris and became an assistant to Auguste Rodin. Declaring that Nothing can grow under big trees, he struck out on his own. Escaping the far-reaching shadow of Rodin, an artist with strong ties to nineteenth-century art, Brancusi steered a radical course that, aesthetically if not thematically broke, with sculptural tradition and laid a foundation for much twentieth-century sculpture. Brancusi s mature style began to evolve as early as 1907, and by 1910 it had reached a minimal essence, as seen in The ÃewÄorn (fig. 27.30) of 1915. Here, he reduces his subject to an ovoid resembling an egg, which suggests fertility and birth. The Î 27. 0 Constantin Brancusi, The Newborn. 1915. Marble, 53*4 + 81*4 + 57*8" (14.6 + 20.9 + 14.9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. 1950 134-10 form also resembles a head, with the concave depression as the mouth releasing its first cry and the slender triangular piercing as the nose. Ìet the whole is so abstract that we are left with a sense of the simple form of the marble, which seems to harbor the hidden mysteries of life. The work has the elemental power of the Cycladic sculpture (see pages 82 84) and simplified, geometric African masks that Brancusi, like Picasso and Matisse, knew so well. Brancusi understood that by using a minimalist vocabulary, he was able to shed in works like The Newborn the clutter of visual reality to pursue invisible essential truths that revealed the very core of existence. As Brancusi explained, Íimplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself in approaching the real sense of things. His works evoke an essence of perfection, as though the scale, the smooth unblemished surfaced, and the composition are so precise that they cannot be altered one iota without destroying their purity and the sense that they capture a primordial reality underlying all life. Brancusi s sculpture focuses on only a handful of themes, which he repeated numerous times, often in different mediums, including bronze, wood, stainless steel, and stone of different kinds. The shift in medium allowed Brancusi to explore both the visual and psychological associations of his material. His meticulous control over his work included designing the bases and pedestals, as can be seen in Bird in Space (fig. 27.31), where the Î 27. 1 Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space. 1928 (unique cast). Bronze, 54 + 81*2 + 61*2" (137.2 + 21.6 + 16.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, ew ork. Given anonymously Ð Ï CHAP TER 27 TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 973 sculpture includes the cylindrical stone base and the hourglassshaped wood pedestal. This stacked system of presentation has the effect of distancing the sculpture from the space of the room and placing it within its own perfect world. Brancusi also realized the height of the presentation of his sculpture affected a viewer s physical and psychological relationship to it, and thus reading of it. Brancusi insisted, for example, that The ÑewÒorn be exhibited on a low pedestal, forcing a viewer to lean over the piece, placing his viewers in the position of an adult looking down at an infant in a cradle. In contrast, Bird in Space would be presented very high, like a soaring bird. Brancusi introduced the bird motif as early as 1910. Maiastra was based on Romanian legends about a magical golden bird whose song held miraculous powers. By the 1920s, Brancusi showed the same bird soaring, as in Bird in Space, instead of perched. The elegantly streamlined form balances on a short, tapering column, the pinched section suggesting the juncture of legs and body. But of course we do not really see a bird. Instead Brancusi has presented us with the spirit of flight, as suggested by the smooth streamlined form that seems to gracefully and effortlessly cut through the air. ÓÔing an entirely different vocabulary, Brancusi, like Malevich, sought to reveal the real sense of things. à á AMERICAN ART Modernism did not come to America until the second decade of the twentieth century. It first appeared in New Õork at 291, the nickname for the Little Galleries of the ×hoto Secession, the progressive art gallery owned by Alfred Stieglitz (see page 936). Beginning in 1909, Stieglitz started featuring such seminal Modernists as ×icasso, Matisse, Henri Rousseau, Rodin, and Brancusi as well as African art and children s art. The key breakthrough Modernist event in New Õork was the 1913 Ønternational ÙÚhiÒition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show after the 26th Street armory where it was held. Exhibited were over Û00 European works, mostly French, from Delacroix, through Courbet, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne, to ×icasso, Brancusi, and Matisse. Three times as many American artists were represented, but by comparison their work often looked provincial and was largely ignored. Ruthless newspaper reviews lambasted the radical contemporary French art, and the public came out in droves 75,000 people attended the four-week show. They came especially to ridicule Duchamp s Ñude ÜescendinÝ a Staircase ÑoÞ ß, which one reviewer claimed looked like an explosion in a shingle factory. âã 27.32 Arthur Dove, lant Forms. ca. 1912. astel on canvas, 171*4 + 237*8" 3.8 + 60.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New ork. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. urchase with Funds from Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger 51.20 á 974 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D ä The exhibition s slogan was The New Spirit, and its symbol was the pine-tree flag of Revolutionary Massachusetts. The American organizers intentionally set out to create their own revolution, to jolt conventional bourgeois taste and bring about an awareness and appreciation of contemporary art. Despite the public s derision, the show spawned several modern art galleries and collectors adventurous enough to dedicate themselves to supporting radical art. America s First Modernistså Arthur æove and Marsden Hartley American artists digested European Modernism almost as quickly as it was made, but those resident in Europe, especially in çaris, absorbed most rapidly the new movements of Fauvism and Cubism. In 1908, a young Arthur Dove (1880 19è6) was in çaris, where he saw work by Matisse and the Fauves. When he returned to New êork, he met Stieglitz and began showing at 291. While remaining involved in the New êork City art world throughout his life, Dove lived in rural areas in New êork State and Connecticut, even spending several years on a houseboat anchored off Long Island. His art focused on nature, not modernity, and capturing universal forces. By 1910, he was painting complete abstractions, two years before ëandinsky and Delaunay, and this abstraction can be seen in a work from 1912, ìlant Forms (fig. 27.32), from a series of pastels titled The Ten Commandments, a title invoking spirituality. In this work, Dove has supplied aspects of nature without painting them illusionistically. As with Cubism, the composition is made up of abstract components, although they overlap in a logical, consistent fashion to suggest continuous recession in space. The work has light and atmosphere as well as an organic quality, largely due to the elliptical, oval, and round forms and the biomorphic shapes suggesting plants and trees. We associate the colors green, ocher, and brown with earth and vegetation, and white and yellow with light. The curved white and yellow forms evoke suns, moons, and hills, and although the frondlike shapes recall plants and trees, they also seem like symbols of an unidentifiable burst of energy. We feel the powerful surge of nature and an elemental life force, and because each form suggests many different objects, Dove is able to convey the universal interconnectedness of all things. The picture is cosmic in its scope, yet provides an intimate view of nature. Dove s preoccupation with portraying potent natural forces will become a major theme in American art and, as we shall see, one of the major issues for artists in Stieglitz s circle. Stieglitz s stable of artists also included Marsden Hartley (1877 19è3), a Maine native who was making çointillist paintings of the New England woods when the two met in 1909. In 1912, Hartley set off for çaris, where he became infatuated with the tribal art on view at the Trocadéro Museum, declaring, with an air of Western supremacy, that one can no longer remain the same in the presence of these mighty children who get so close to the universal idea in their mud-baking. He stated that art had to be CHAP TER 27 òò ó ô õ ÷ Marsden Hartley, ortrait of a erman fficer. 191 . 27. Oil on canvas, 681*4 + 13*8" (173. + 105.1 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New ork. The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 19 9. ( 9.70. 2) ÷ ÷ ÷ ø ÷ ÷ created out of spiritual necessity and, finding French art superficial and lacking soul, he went to Berlin in 1913. There he read the writings of the great German mystics, such as íakob Boehme (1575 162è). He then developed a unique form of Synthetic Cubism, which he combined with Fauvist and German Expressionist color to produce paintings filled with spiritual content, as can be seen in ìortrait of a ðerman ñfficer (fig. 27.33), completed in 191è and later bought by Stieglitz. TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 975 This large painting is one in a series dedicated to the memory of Karl von Freyburg, Hartley s lover, who was among the first soldiers killed in World War I. Shown in the painting are such German military paraphernalia as iron crosses, insignia, helmets, boots, service stripes, badges, flags, spurs, and tassels. In a sense, this abstraction is a still life that in spirit recalls Victorian keepsake boxes made for the deceased and containing photographs, clothing, hair, and memorabilia all pressed under glass. The painting is dominated by a triangle and is filled with circles that reflect Kandinsky s Theosophical belief in the symbolism of geometry. In its jumble of color, form, and composition, Portrait of a German Officer expresses a cosmic force similar to Kandinsky s Compositions (see fig. 27.14) from the same period, and at times its abstraction seems to suggest landscape almost as readily as it does still life. With the outbreak of World War I, Hartley returned to the United States and to making landscapes, using an Expressionist style that revealed the elemental, spiritual power of nature. EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN EUROPE In Chapter 26, we saw the emergence of two distinct approaches to modern architecture, one in the United States and another in Europe. American artists such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright challenged historicism and conventional revivalism when they eliminated the distinction between the form of a building and its proposed function. In Europe, we also saw a rejection of revival styles when Art Nouveau defined modern architecture as an organic style of growth and movement. Throughout the twentieth century, modern architecture followed these opposite poles set by the Chicago School and Art Nouveau the rational, geometric and functional versus the personal, referential, and expressive. Austrian and German Modernist Architecture Austria and Germany shaped modern architecture in the opening decades of the century. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, discussed in the previous chapter (see page 930), became the rage in Europe in the 1890s and was particularly idolized in Vienna at the turn of the century by young architects searching for an alternative to Art Nouveau. An especially influential Viennese architect was Adolf Loos (1870 1933). After graduating from the Dresden College of Technology, Loos traveled to Chicago to attend the 1893 Columbian Exposition and stayed three years, digesting the functionalism of the Midwest architects and especially coming under the spell of Louis Sullivan. Upon returning to Vienna, he designed interiors and wrote for a liberal magazine, in which he railed against the extravagant ornamentation of Art Nouveau. In 1908, he published his functionalist theories in a book titled Ornament and Crime. He declared that except for tombs and monuments, buildings should be functional. Modern man, the ADOLF LOOS 27.34 Adolf Loos. Garden façade of Steiner House, Vienna. 1910 976 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 27.35 Peter B hrens. A.E.G. Turbinenfabrik (Turbine Factory), B rlin. 1909 10 man with modern nerves, does not need ornamentationù it disgusts him, he wrote. He even drew a parallel between ornament and scatological graffiti. Furthermore, as a socialist, he found decoration and historicism particularly offensive because of their associations with the wealthy as well as with the oppression of the artisan. Loos put his theories into practice in the Steiner House (fig. 27.34) of 1910. In the U-shaped garden façade seen here, Loos used a severe design that emphasizes geometric blocklike components of the structure. Loos s unadorned building even results in the cornice almost disappearing, being reduced to a thin, almost undetectable strip. The windows, especially the horizontal ones, seem more functional than aesthetic. In 1923, Loos migrated to úaris, where, as we shall see, High Modernist architects embraced his antiornamentalism, and viewed his Steiner House as an important model. MUTHESIUS AND PETER BEHRENS In Germany, government and industry nurtured Modernist architecture. In 1896, government officials sent architect Hermann Muthesius to London, then the world leader in ûuality mass production, to study üritish industry and design. Upon returning home in 1904, Muthesius was appointed to the úrussian Trade HERMANN CHAP TER 27 Commission and given the task of restructuring education in the applied arts. To dominate world markets, he advocated mass production of functional objects executed in a well-designed machine style. In 1907, he was instrumental in establishing the Deutsche Werkbund, an association of architects, designers, writers, and industrialists whose goal was selecting the best representatives of art, industry, crafts, and trades, and combining all efforts toward high ûuality in industrial work. In architecture he called for a new monumental style based on Schinkel s Classicism (see page 8ý4), but reflecting modern industrial values, meaning mass production and modular components. þne of Muthesius s appointments to the Werkbund was architect úeter üehrens (1868 1940), who had been head of an appliedarts school in Düsseldorf. Also in 1907, üehrens was named design consultant to A.E.G., the German General Electric Companyÿ he was responsible for the design of their buildings, products, and marketing materials. üetween the Werkbund and A.E.G., üehrens had a mandate to implement the German belief in industrialization as its Manifest Destiny, and he was charged with finding a visual expression for the brute reality of industrial power. He accomplished this goal in his finest A.E.G. building, the 1909 üerlin Turbinenfabrik (Turbine Factory) (fig. 27.35). TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV OL UTION, 1904 1914 977 27.36 Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer. Fagus Factory, Alfeld-an-der-eine, Germany This temple to industry is a veritable symbol of industrial might. The enormous main space is constructed of a row of hinged steel arches (their shape echoed in the roofline on the façade) like those used for nineteenth-century ferrovitreous train stations and exhibition halls (see figs. 25.38 and 25.39). Instead of a greenhouse encased in a historical façade, however, Behrens produces an abstract monumental structure that evokes a noble Classical temple and Egyptian entrance gateway. The corners are massive rusticated Egyptian pylons that support an enormous gable, whereas the windows on the side walls are recessed so that the lower portion of the steel arches is exposed, making the row of arches resemble a colonnade. Yet Behrens declares the building s modernity not only in its austere abstract vocabulary but also in the enormous window on the end an unmistakably Modernist transparent curtain wall that seems to hang from the pediment. Although Behrens aggrandized industry in the monumental Turbinenfabrik, he did not produce the machine style that Muthesius was advocating the Typisierung, a type or a basic unit, the equivalent of a mass-produced modular building that could be 978 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D used by all architects. This machine style would be developed by the three architects in Behrens s office: Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Of the architects in Behrens s office in 1910, Walter Gropius (1883 1969) was the most advanced. With associate Adolf Meyer, he was commissioned in 1911 to design the Fagus Factory (fig. 27.36), a shoe plant in Alfeld-an-derLeine. Well versed in the achievements of Loos and Behrens, Gropius nonetheless reached back to the Chicago School and utilized their steel-grid skeleton, sheathed in a ferrovitreous curtain wall. The factory s glass façade appears to be magically suspended from the brick-faced entablature above. It even turns corners unobstructed. The building feels light and transparent, the window mullions thin and elegant. Horizontal opaque panels, the exact size and shape of the glass, indicate each of the three floors and continue the modular composition of the windows. The only nod to the past is the prominent Beaux-Arts entrance and the thin pseudo-piers faced in brick that support the entablature. Otherwise, with the Fagus Factory, Gropius created the WALTER GROPIUS machine style Muthesius was seeking: an unadorned building that adheres to a grid skeleton. This building type was so efficient and reproducible it would serve as the prototype for the glass-box structures that would dominate world architecture for the rest of the century. German Expressionist Architecture Not all German architects embraced technology, the Machine Age, and Muthesius s concept of the Typisierung. Some instead designed expressive spiritual structures meant to counter the cold impersonal impact of modernity. Another Werkbund architect was Henri van de Velde (1863 1957), a native of Belgium, where he was initially a successful Neo-Impressionist painter and then an Art Nouveau architect and designer. In 1901, he became consultant to the craft industries in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimer. Van de Velde was a strong advocate of Nietzsche s theory of the Übermensch and believed in the importance of designing powerful, expressive architecture. He was also heavily influenced by the Munich psychologist Theodor Lipps and his theory of Einfühlung, meaning empathy, the mystical projection of the ego onto the art object. This background led him to examine Wilhelm Worringer s 1908 book Abstaktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy), which advocated attaining transcendence through abstraction as well as championing an aesthetic of emphatic expression of vital psychic states. HENRI VAN DE VELDE On a 1903 trip to Greece and the Middle East, Van de Velde became entranced by the powerful simplicity and purity of Assyrian and Mycenaean buildings (see pages 34 37 and 93 99), which he translated into modern terms in the theater he built for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne (fig. 27.37). This structure was deliberately designed to counter Mathesius s Typisierung, as best represented by Gropius s model factory at the 1914 fair. Despite its massive abstraction, Van de Velde s structure seems like a living organic body rather than a cold, rigid box. Each space within the building is readable from the exterior and has its own identity. Because of the curves, the building seems to swell and breathe. However, this is no longer the springtime effervescence of Art Nouveau; rather, it is a reflection of a need to invest architecture with a spirituality and life force and to enhance these qualities by echoing the powerful monumentality and purity of the forms of ancient Near Eastern civilizations. A more overt spiritual contribution at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition was Bruno Taut s (1880 1928) Glass Pavilion (fig. 27.38), built for the glass industry and reflecting his belief in the mystical properties of crystal. The guru of glass was poet Paul Scheerbart, whose 1914 essay Glasarchitektur, published in Der Sturm, had a tremendous impact on artists and architects. (See www.myartslab.com.) The entablature of Taut s Glass Pavilion is even etched with Scheerbart s aphorisms about the power of glass. Scheerbart claimed that only a glass architecture that opened all rooms to light could raise German culture to a new spiritual BRUNO TAUT 27.37 Henri van de Velde. Werkbund Theater, Cologne. 1913 14. Demolished 1920 CHAP TER 27 TOWARD ABS TRACTION: THE MODERN IS T REV O L UTION, 1904 1914 979 main space had a central oculus that emitted a shower of colored spiritual light. The year before, the mystically inspired architect Max Berg (1870 1947) used a similar ocular motif for his Jahrhunderthalle (Centennial Hall) (fig. 27.39) in Breslau, erected to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Germany s liberation from Napoleon s rule. Berg s Expressionism is quite Romantic, for the enormous building, made possible by ferroconcrete (steel-reinforced concrete), conjures the sublime grandeur of Piranesi s fantasies of Rome (see fig. 23.3) and Boullée s visionary monuments (see fig. 23.24). (See Materials and Techniques, page 1013.) Massive elliptical arches resemble an ancient Roman aqueduct or bridge bent into a circle and springing from the floor. The ribbing of the ceiling recalls the Pantheon, but solid and void have been reversed since the coffered section is now windows, creating an aura of celestial light that makes the dome seem to float. The Pantheon s ocular opening is now closed. At the time, critics likened this dark disk to the iris of an eye, and the entire levitating dome to a giant eyeball connected to the universe. As expressed by one contemporary writer, the cosmos opened to reveal the courses of the stars and the empyrean. In 1925, Berg abandoned architecture to dedicate his life to Christian mysticism. But in 1912, when Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were committed to leading Germany into a world of higher spirituality through painting, prints, and drawings, Berg sought to achieve the same in ferroconcrete and glass. MAX BERG 278 Bruno Taut. Glass Pavilion, Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne. 1914 level. Consequently, Taut used glass brick for the walls and floors. The bulbous dome, which resembles a giant crystal, is made of two layers of glass; the outer one reflective, the inner one a myriad of colored-glass pieces resembling medieval stained glass. Taut also considered his cupola to be Gothic, its facets evoking the élan vital of the ribbing of the Flamboyant style. The ceiling of the 279 Max Berg. Interior of the Jahrhunderthalle (Centennial Hall), Breslau, Germany. 1912 13 980 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D Toward Abstraction: The Modernist Revolution, 1904 1914 1870 * 1875 Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott found the Theosophical Society in New York 1900 * 1900 Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams 1905 * 1905 15 Albert Einstein introduces the theory of relativity 1905 Critic Louis Vauxcelles names Fauvism 1905 Die Brücke (The Bridge) formed 1905 Alfred Stieglitz opens his gallery 291 * 1907 Henri Bergson publishes Creative Evolution 1905 06 Matisse s Le Bonheur de Vivre 1880 1890 1907 Picasso s Les Demoiselles d Avignon 1910 Egon Schiele s Self-Portrait with Twisted Arm 1911 13 The Fagus Factory, designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, is erected 1907 8 Gustav Klimt, The Kiss * * 1910 1914 Delaunay s Homage to Blériot 1908 Henry Ford introduces the Model T Ford 1909 Critic Louis Vauxcelles names Cubism 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti issues a Manifesto of Futurism 1909 Louis Blériot flies across the English Channel * 1910 Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) formed * 1911 Vasily Kandinsky publishes Concerning the Spiritual in Art 1912 Picasso creates first collage and the first-known construction * 1914 Marsden Hartley s Portrait of a German Officer * 1913 First performance of Igor Stravinsky s The Rite of Spring 1913 Niels Bohr introduces atomic theory 1913 Armory Show in New York City 1914 James Joyce begins Ulysses 1914 World War I begins 1915 1915 Malevich s Black Square 981 P HYSICALLY AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY, WORLD WAR CHAPTER 28 Art Between the Wars I DEVASTATED Western civilization. The destruction and loss of life were staggering, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers dying in single battles. The logic, science, and technology that many thought would bring a better world had gone horribly awry. Instead of a better world, the advancements of the nineteenth century had produced such hi-tech weapons as machine guns, long-range artillery, tanks, submarines, fighter planes, and mustard gas. To many, the very concept of nationalism now seemed destructive, and the rise of the first Communist government in Russia in 1917 offered some the hope of salvation. Around the world, branches of the Communist Party sprang up, with the goal of creating a nationless world united by the proletariat, the working class that provides the labor force for the capitalist system. Others maintained that a new world order could not be attained without first destroying the old; they advocated anarchy, which remained a constant threat in the postwar decades. Despite this drive to create a nationless and classless world, by the 1930s, it was fascism that had taken hold of European politics. Fascism, a totalitarian political system that exalts the nation over the individual and demands allegiance to a single leader, held a special appeal in nations defeated in World War I. Germany, in particular, had been humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and had suffered extreme inflation and then economic collapse. Germans gradually came under the spell of Adolf Hitler (1889 1945) and the Nazis, who skillfully used economic crises and anti-Semitism to consolidate their power. In Italy, Spain, and Japan, as well, fascists, under the command of charismatic leaders, took control. Armed with new technological tools of Detail of figure 28.38, Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City destruction, these nations would plunge the world into another great war by 1939. While fascism, communism, anarchy, and democracy jockeyed for dominance in Europe, America enjoyed unprecedented prosperity in the 1920s. Historians have called the economic and cultural exuberance of the postwar years the Roaring Twenties; it was a time of jazz, speakeasies, radio, and film. The 1920s also saw the rise of the city as the emblem of the nation. Technology and machines were king in America, where the world s largest skyscrapers could be erected in a year. This economic exhilaration came to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent the entire world into a downward economic spiral known as the Great Depression, which lasted throughout the 1930s. A reactionary backlash then occurred in both Europe and America: fascism in the former, and a conservative regionalism and isolationism in the latter. Nonetheless, the 1930s marked the advent in America of liberal social and economic programs, instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt s administration (1932 44). Believing that economic markets were inherently unstable, Roosevelt advocated the New Deal, which created millions of government-sponsored jobs, including many for artists. Perhaps the strongest defining influence for artists between the wars was the Great War itself and the technology, science, and Enlightenment rationalism that allowed it to be so devastating. The war directly produced Dada, a movement that created a nonsensical nihilistic art that attacked bourgeois values and CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 983 N Amsterdam Queen Charlotte Islands NORT H AM ER ICA Vancouver M i ss o Toronto Bethlehem New York Cedar Rapids Lancaster Philadelphia Washington, D.C. St. Louis ITALY 200 km 200 miles pi City Milan Chicago Detroit i Munich AUSTRIA ip iss Mi ss UNITED STATES MEXICO NORWAY SWEDEN DENMARK l Ba GREAT HOLLAND BRITAIN Berlin London GERMANY POLAND Moscow USSR Kiev Vienna ROMANIA FRANCE Belgrade ITALY BULGARIA Black Sea SPAIN See inset Istanbul Rome PORTUGAL Madrid TURKEY Medite GREECE rr ne an Sea ALGERIA Paris SWITZ. AUSTRIA a San Francisco Fresno ur D FRANCE Zürich SWITZ. Fort Peck Dam Great Salt Salt Lake Lake Brussels Poissy-sur-Seine Le Raincy GERMANY CZECH REPUBLIC Paris Stuttgart be BOHEMIA Versailles anu Se a CANADA Berlin Düsseldorf Dessau Cologne Weimar ti c Utrecht MOROCCO EGYPT AT L ANT I C ATL Gulf of Mexico CUBA O CE AN Mexico City AFR ICA C ari b b ean Sea Se a PACIFIC OCEAN 1,000 km S OUTH AM ER IC A 1,000 miles Map 28.1 Europe and North America in the 1920s and 1930s conventions, including a faith in technology. The Dadaists aimed to wipe the philosophical slate clean, leading the way to a new world order. Other artists embraced the modernity of the Machine Age (as this interwar period is sometimes called), seeing it as a means to create classless utopias; still others rejected it, seeking higher truths or a meaningful spirituality in an increasingly materialistic, soulless world. Both groups often turned to abstraction to implement their vision. Those supporting technology embraced the geometry and mechanical look of the Machine Age, while those who rejected it sought higher truths often using an organic or biomorphic vocabulary. A second major force for the period was Sigmund Freud, whose theories about the unconscious and dreams were a formative influence on Surrealism, a prevailing movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Like many abstract artists, the Surrealists sought to reveal invisible realities not spiritual ones, but elemental universal forces that drove all humans. These unseen realities were deeply embedded in the mind and symbolically revealed in dreams. Freud maintained that the conventions of civilization had repressed the elemental needs and desires that all people shared, and that this suppressed, invisible world of desires and sexual energy was fundamental to human behavior, the driving force within all humans. Freud acknowledged that civilized societies required the repression and channeling of those desires, but asserted that individuals paid a price in the form of neuroses and discontent. For Surrealist artists, as well as writers and intellectuals, 984 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D Freud s theory of the unconscious confirmed the existence of realities unseen by the eye or unperceived by the conscious mind, and they served as the springboard for the development of Surrealist imagery and style. Politics also strongly shaped the art of the period. Many, if not most, avant-garde artists were socialists and Communists, or at least sympathizers, and their utopian dreams and aesthetic visions stem in part from these political ideologies. The narrative, representational murals of the great Mexican artists directly champion Communism, especially when paired with science, as the vehicle for creating a classless utopian society. With the rise to power of Hitler and his National Socialist Party, many avant-garde artists turned their attention to making antifascist imagery and exposing the insane thinking and sadistic brutality of the new German government. This period also saw a growing interest in racial and ethnic identity, which was expressed in Mexican art and AfricanAmerican art. The Mexican muralists were preoccupied with national identity, which they associated with the indigenous population, not Euro-Mexicans, while African Americans sought to uncover their heritage and culture. Just as Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Margaret Julia Cameron sought to present women from a female viewpoint, obtaining very different results from male artists, the Mexicans and African Americans did the same for native and African cultures. These artists presented a very different image of and attitude toward non-European civilizations. DADA The Great War halted much art making, as many artists were enlisted in their countries military service. Some of the finest were killed, such as the German Expressionist Marc and the Italian Futurist Boccioni. But the conflict also produced one art movement: Dada. Its name was chosen at random, the story goes, when two German poets, Richard Huelsenbeck and Hugo Ball, plunged a knife into a French German dictionary and its point landed on dada, the French word for hobbyhorse. The word s association with childishness as well as the random violence of the poets act of word choice fit the postwar spirit of the movement perfectly. As the birth story of Dada suggests, the foundations of the movement lay in chance occurrences and the absurd. Logic and reason, the Dada artists concluded, had led only to war. For them, the nonsensical and the ridiculous became tools to jolt their audience out of their bourgeois complacence and conventional thinking. The movement was profoundly committed to challenging the status quo in politics as well as in culture. Dada began in 1916 in neutral Zurich, where a large number of writers and artists had sought refuge from the war and dedicated themselves, as Ball declared, to remind the world that there are independent men, beyond war and nationalism, who live for other ideals. The Dada spirit spread across the West and to parts of Eastern Europe and would become a reference point for artists throughout the twentieth century. Zurich Dada: Jean Arp In Zurich, the poet Hugh Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 as a performance center where writers and artists could protest the absurdity and wastefulness of the Great War. (The name Voltaire referred to the great Enlightenment philosophe whose ideas epitomized the logic that the Dadaists were attacking; see page 786.) Ball was soon joined by the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, who became Dada s most vociferous proponent. The artists and writers at the Cabaret Voltaire attacked the rational thinking that, in their view, produced the depraved civilization responsible for the war. Their target was all established values political, moral, and aesthetic and their goal was to level the old bourgeois order through nonsense and anarchy. In the end, they hoped to produce a tabula rasa, a clean slate, that would provide a new foundation for a fresh understanding of the world. The Cabaret Voltaire group, which included the Alsatian painter and poet Jean Arp, mounted boisterous performances. Wearing fanciful costumes, including primitive cardboard masks, they recited abstract phonetic poems of nonwords. ( Zimzum urallal zumzum urallal zumzum zanzibar zumazall zam went one line in Hugo Ball s O Gadji Beri Bimba. To listen to Ball s sound poems, go to www.myartslab.com.) The readings were virtually drowned out by an accompanying music, a cacophony of sounds, often the arrhythmic beating of a drum. The performers chaos whipped the audiences into frenzies of catcalls, whistles, and shouts. Some evenings, Tzara harangued the audience with rambling, virtually incomprehensible Dada manifestos. And, just as chance had named the Dada movement, it was used to create works themselves. Dada poems were written by pulling words out of a hat. Sometimes one poem was read simultaneously in different languages, or different verses of the same poem were read simultaneously in one language. The resulting chance weaving of words together in a new way created a fresh unpredictable poetic fabric, both in sound and meaning. Some performances included danses nègres and chants nègres, as African dance and music were called, reflecting the group s interest in so-called primitive cultures, cultures supposedly free of the evils of advanced civilization. Furthermore, the Dada artists believed that the directness and simplicity of African cultures put those cultures in touch with the primal essence of nature itself. Perhaps the most far-reaching influence of Dada performances was that they tore down the boundaries that had separated the various arts as visual artists, musicians, poets, actors, and writers worked together. Furthermore, the Dadaists destroyed any hierarchy of medium and genre. The Zurich Dadaists exhibited a broad range of avant-garde art, such as paintings by Klee and de Chirico (see pages 961 and 969, respectively) as long as the art undermined bourgeois taste and standards. Most of the art presented at the Cabaret Voltaire and its successor, the Galerie Dada, was abstract. Among the strongest visual artists in the group was Jean (or Hans his name changed with the shifting national status of his hometown Strasbourg) Arp (1886 1966), whose abstract collages hung on the walls of the Cabaret Voltaire on opening night. Arp made his collages by dropping pieces of torn rectangular paper on the floor; where they fell determined the composition. Although he claimed that chance alone arranged the papers, Arp probably manipulated them. Arp believed that chance itself replicated nature. For him, life, despite the best-laid plans, was pure happenstance. Arp had been in Munich with Kandinsky (see pages 958 60), and there he adopted a mystical view of the world that envisioned a life force running through all things, binding them together in no particular order. Like Kandinsky, Arp sought to capture abstract universal forces. This spiritual outlook can be seen in the low-relief sculptures he began making at about this time, such as The Entombment of the Birds and Butterflies (Head of Tzara) (fig. 28.1). The different shapes were determined by doodling on paper. He then had a carpenter cut the shapes out of wood, which Arp painted and assembled into abstract compositions evoking plant and animal forms as well as clouds, cosmic gases, and celestial bodies. The title came last, and, as it suggests, the image can be also seen as a head, suggesting an elemental connection between humans and nature. The Cabaret Voltaire closed by the summer of 1916 and was replaced by a succession of other venues. Meanwhile, Tzara s magazine, Dada, spread the word about the movement worldwide. By the end of the war in late 1918, Zurich had been abandoned by many of the major artists, and by early 1919, Zurich CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 985 Perhaps the highlight of New York Dada is Duchamp s Fountain (fig. 28.2). Duchamp submitted this sculpture to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, an organization begun several decades earlier to provide exhibition opportunities for artists who did not conform to the conservative standards of New York s National Academy of Design, which had been the primary exhibition venue. Duchamp labeled his Fountain an Assisted Readymade. He took the term Readymade from American readymade clothing, and applied it to his sculptures that simply re-presented a found object, such as a snow shovel, which Duchamp hung from the ceiling and entitled In Advance of a Broken Arm. Objects that he assisted, by joining them with other objects, as in Bicycle Wheel (see fig. 27.29), or by signing, as in Fountain, he called an Assisted Readymade. As we saw in Chapter 27, Duchamp began working with found objects when he made his Bicycle Wheel in 1913, although he did not exhibit his Readymades and coin the term until he was in New York. Fountain was, in fact, a urinal manufactured by J. L. Mott Iron Works in New York. Duchamp selected it, purchased it, turned it 90 degrees, set it on a pedestal, and crudely signed it with the fictitious name of R. Mutt a reference not only to the manufacturer but also to the character Mutt in the popular Mutt and Jeff comic strip. The sculpture was 28.1 Jean (Hans) Arp, The Entombment of the Birds and Butterflies (Head of Tzara). 1916 17. Painted wooden relief, 153*4 + 123*4" (40 + 32.5 cm). Kunsthaus, Zurich Dada had drawn to a close. Only after the war was over did Tzara hear that there was a New York Dada movement happening simultaneously, if not in name, at least in spirit. New York Dada: Marcel Duchamp New York Dada was centered on Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, both of whom fled Paris and the war in 1915. Picabia was notorious for his satirical portraits in which the subject is represented by a machine. In one, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (see pages 936, 938, and 974) was portrayed as a camera, which takes on human qualities embodying Stieglitz s personality. The New York artists had no Cabaret Voltaire, no manifestos, and no performances, although they did hold a weekly salon at the home of the wealthy writer Walter Arensberg and his wife, Louise. From 1915 to 1916, they published their avant-garde art and ideas in a magazine entitled 291, which was sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz, who as well as being a photographer was one of the first dealers of avant-garde art in America. The word Dada was never used at the time to describe their art; it was only applied in retrospect because their spirit was similar to that found in Zurich. 986 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 28.2 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain. 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, from The Blind Man. May 1917. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection submitted to the society s exhibition under Mutt s name, not Duchamp s. According to the society s rules, anyone paying the $6 admission fee would have his or her work accepted. But Duchamp knew the hanging committee would not consider Fountain art and so not allow it to go on view, and when it was removed at the opening, his friends formed a rowdy procession that drew attention to its rejection. Duchamp continued the hoax of R. Mutt s authorship of the work when he wrote an article about the piece in a small newspaper he published with artist Beatrice Wood, The Blind Man, which only survived two issues but was well circulated in the avant-garde art world. The article was illustrated by a Stieglitz photograph of Fountain placed before a painting by Marsden Hartley (see fig. 27.33), an arrangement that underscored that the proper context for the appropriated urinal was the art world. The article defended Mutt s right to create a Readymade: Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view [creating] a new thought for that object. Like all of Duchamp s works, Fountain is rich in ideas, and it stands as one of the seminal works of twentieth-century art, although the original has disappeared. The sculpture is all about ideas. A viewer of Fountain must ask: What is the work of art? Is it the urinal, the provocation of submitting it to the exhibition, the flamboyant parade when it was removed from the show, or the article about it in The Blind Man? Obviously, it is all of these things. Even the title is essential to the work, since it is an essential part of the sculpture, and it allows Duchamp to make it clear that he is attacking one of the more revered art forms, the fountain, which is the centerpiece for most European towns and city squares and is, in some respects, a symbol for the tradition of fine art. The satirical title also reinforces the humor of the piece, an ingredient found in much of Duchamp s work. Duchamp is telling us art can be humorous; it can defy conventional notions of beauty, and while intellectually engaging us in a most serious manner, it can also make us smile or laugh. Duchamp challenges the notion of what art is and the importance of technique or craft, as well as of the artist s signature. He also asks how a work of art takes on meaning. Here, Duchamp emphasizes the relationship between context and meaning: By taking a urinal out of its normal context he has changed its meaning. (For a more extensive discussion of Duchamp, focusing on his Mona Lisa with a moustache, see the Introduction, pages xxvi xxvii.) He even allows a viewer to assign meaning to the work, underscoring how this is a reality for all art, not just his. Ironically, unlike all art that preceded his, his Readymades have no aesthetic value and theoretically no intended meaning. They are merely a device to launch ideas. Because Fountain is industrially manufactured and can be easily replaced if broken or lost (the original is lost, and in 1964 the work was editioned, that is to say, several identical examples were produced), Duchamp also questions the significance attached to the uniqueness of a work of art. As we shall see, in the second half of the twentieth century, Duchamp will become the dominant figure in art as artists worldwide make what will be called Conceptual Art. For those artists, an idea or conceptual premise is the most important component of their work, in effect replacing the visual component. In contrast to Zurich Dada, New York Dada was very quiet. In Manhattan, the group was far removed from the war, and it did not have a political agenda. Its focus was largely on defining art, following Duchamp s lead. More important, New York Dada was light-hearted and witty, as in Picabia s humanoid machines and Duchamp s Fountain. Dada art with a more acute sense of social mission was produced in wartorn Germany. Berlin Dada With the end of the war, the Dada poet Richard Huelsenbeck (1892 1974) left Zurich for Berlin. There, he found a moribund city, which like the rest of Germany was without food, money, medicine, or a future. Germans, especially the working class, loathed the military-industrial machine, which they felt had betrayed their interests by leading them into war. With the surrender, conditions worsened as Germany was punished by harsh and, some thought, unrealistic reparation demands. Inflation was rampant, and the value of the German currency plunged. Open class conflict in 1919 resulted in Communist-led worker uprisings in Berlin and Munich that were brutally repressed by right-wing armed units. The Weimar Republic government, which had replaced the Kaiser (emperor) and represented Germany s first experience with democracy, failed to revive the economy. Its refusal in 1923 to make war reparations only resulted in further humiliation when the French military occupied the Ruhr Valley and seized the German assets in that coalmining region. For many, hope lay in the East, in Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution established the prospect for a nationless world governed by the proletariat. The artists and writers of Berlin Dada looked to international worker solidarity as Germany s salvation. Here was a situation where Dada anarchy and nihilism could be put to practical use. Almost without exception, the Berlin Dada contingent made political art and were political activists, with some members, such as George Grosz and John Heartfield, joining the Communist Party. In Berlin, the poet Huelsenbeck employed the usual Dada devices. He created an organization, Club Dada, and published manifestos calling for the overthrow of the bourgeois establishment and the creation of an egalitarian society. The principal members of the group included Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, and John Heartfield. In 1920 they organized the first Dada International Fair, which featured worldwide Dada art. In the center of the fair, hanging from the ceiling, was an army-uniformed dummy with the head of a pig and wearing a sign saying Hanged by the Revolution. The work, a collaboration by Hausmann and Grosz, epitomized Dada s abhorrence of the establishment. CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 987 Hausmann (1886 1971) quickly became the leader of Berlin Dada, and was perhaps the most visually inventive, as can be seen in his 1920 assemblage Mechanical Head (Spirit of the Age) (fig. 28.3). He used found objects, which at the time were so foreign to the art world they were considered junk: a hairdresser s dummy, a collapsible cup, a crocodile wallet, labels, nails, a bronze segment of an old camera, a typewriter cylinder, a length of measuring tape, and a ruler. But now we see a new approach to making sculpture: The found objects are assembled together, an approach generally labeled assemblage. Through this accumulation of objects, Hausmann presents a mindless, lifeless dummy, the contemporary German, whose actions and thoughts are molded by external forces, rendering it mechanical, even robotic, and with no personal identity. Hausmann claimed the typical German has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued onto the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty. Hausmann, however, is best known for his use of language and collage. Like Hugo Ball in Zurich, he wrote and performed phonetic poems made according to the laws of chance. (To listen to his Dada poems, go to www.myartslab.com.) His interest in words, letters, and sound led him in 1919 to innovative experiments with typography, in which he used different typefaces and RAOUL HAUSMANN sizes for individual letters cut from magazines and newspapers, the shifts in scale indicating how the letter should be emphasized when sounded. These words were incorporated into ingenious collages made from material cut from different printed sources and rearranged in new contexts. Some of the most elaborate and powerful Dada collages from the period were created by Hannah Höch (1889 1978), who was Hausmann s companion from roughly 1915 to 1922. Her Dada collages mimic manipulated portraits made for German soldiers. Individuals or entire battalions hired photographers to create fictitious portraits by photographing them, then cutting out their heads and pasting them onto preexisting pictures of, for example, mounted militia. (See Primary Source, page 991.) Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (fig. 28.4) speaks volumes about the agenda of Berlin Dada. Using a chaotic, cramped composition of crowds, words, machinery, and lettering of different sizes and styles, Höch captures the hectic social, political, and economic intensity of the Weimar Republic. Her collage of photographs represents images of contemporary life made by photographers for the popular press. To Höch and her Dada colleagues, the camera was another machine that could be associated with the technological advances that had led to the war. With her kitchen knife, she killed the machine, and rearranged the imagery to create a hand-made photograph, thus humanizing the mechanical. The resulting image is a spinning, gearlike composition with a portrait of the radical antiwar artist Käthe Kollwitz at the center. German masses and the new leaders of their government, the Weimar Republic, are pushed to the sides and villainously labeled as the anti-Dada, meaning against Dada and leftist politics. Collage, of course, was not new. But previously it had been used in a more refined manner, particularly by the Cubists, who had generally transformed the found materials taken from popular culture into beautiful art (see fig. 28.12). With Hausmann and Höch, however, collage retained the look and feeling of popular culture, especially the advertising look seen in the mass media. The Berlin Dadaists did not call their works collages, which suggests fine art. Instead, they labeled them photomontages, which evoked machine-made, mass-produced images. Their photomontages looked like antiart, and their powerfully abrupt compositions embodied the group s political stridency. HANNAH HÖCH Though not a Dada artist, Käthe Kollwitz (1867 1945), spotlighted by Höch in Cut with the Kitchen Knife, provided an important precedent for the political and expressive nature of Berlin Dada and is often simply labeled an Expressionist. A generation older than Höch, she was denied admission to the Berlin Academy because she was a woman. She studied at a women s art school, and after marrying a doctor, settled in a working-class neighborhood in Berlin. There, her husband treated the poor, who became the subject of her art. She shunned painting as an elitist medium of the academy and KÄTHE KOLLWITZ 28.3 Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head (Spirit of the Age). ca. 1920. Assemblage, height 123*4" (32.5 cm). Musée National d Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 988 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 28.4 Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany. ca. 1919. Collage, 447*8 + 353*8" (114 + 90.2 cm). Staatliche Museen, rlin CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 989 the war and had suffered a mental breakdown, was especially bitter about the disastrous course charted by Germany s leaders. Upon convalescing and returning to Berlin, he was stylistically inspired by the expressive Cubism of the Futurists and worked in this style at the same time as he produced his more radical photomontages. A fine example of his Cubist style is Germany, A Winter s Tale (fig. 28.6) of 1918. Here, the city of Berlin forms the kaleidoscopic, chaotic background for several large figures, which are superimposed on it as in a collage. They include the marionettelike good citizen at his table and the sinister forces that have molded him: a hypocritical clergyman, a brutal general, and an evil schoolmaster. For Grosz, this triumverate reflects the decadent world of the bourgeoisie that he, like many German intellectuals, hoped would be overthrown by Communism. In 1920, he, along with Kollwitz and other artists, joined the International Workers Aid, a Communist organization. 28.5 Käthe Kollwitz, Never Again War! 1924. Lithograph, 37 + 271*2" (94 + 70 cm). Courtesy Galerie St. Étienne, New York the bourgeoisie, and instead made drawings and prints, which could be mass-produced and circulated to wider audiences. For the Berlin Dada artists, who were committed to clear political messages, Kollwitz was an inspiration. Although for the 1920s, her representational style was somewhat conservative, her message was influential, for she had created a large body of powerful Expressionist work that conveyed her sympathies with the working class, and victims of war. In addition, her imagery contains far more women than does that of her male counterparts and reflects her socialist vision of women playing an equal role in the ideal Germany of the future. Typical of her Expressionist style of strident marks, strong value contrasts, and powerful emotions is her antiwar poster Never Again War! (fig. 28.5), a lithograph published in 1924 and embodying personal content, since Höch lost a son in World War I. In 1920, Höch became the first woman ever admitted to the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. G R O S Z An early maker of Dada photomontages, George Grosz (1893 1959), provides a clear example of the Expressionist element in Berlin Dada and its direct connection with Kollwitz. (Like Höch, Grosz is often labeled a postwar Expressionist.) Grosz, who had been seriously wounded twice in GEORGE 990 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 28.6 George Grosz, Germany, A Winter s Tale. 1918. Oil on canvas. Formerly Collection Garvens, Hannover, Germany From an interview with Édouard Roditi In an interview with art historian Édouard Roditi, the German Dada artist Hannah Höch talks about the inspiration for her Dada photomontages. A ctually, we borrowed the idea from a trick of the official photographers of the Prussian army regiments. They used to have elaborate oleolithographed mounts, representing a group of uniformed men with a barracks or a landscape in the background, but with the faces cut out; in these mounts, the photographers then inserted photographic portraits of the faces of their customers, generally coloring them later by hand. But the aesthetic purpose, if any, of this very primitive kind of photomontage was to idealize reality, whereas the Dada photomonteur set out to give to something entirely unreal all the appearances of something real that had actually been photographed. Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry in the world of art. Our typographical collages or montages also set out to achieve similar effects by imposing, on something which could only be produced by hand, the appearances of something that had been entirely composed by a machine; in an imaginative composition, we used to bring together elements borrowed from books, newspapers, posters, or leaflets, in an arrangement that no machine could yet compose. PRIMARY SOURCE Hannah Höch (1889 1978) Source: Édouard Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists (Bedford Arts Publishers, 1990) Cologne Dada In the city of Cologne, Dada initially took its lead from Berlin, but it was never as political. Dada artists here were intrigued by Freud s theory of the unconscious and favored figures that combined mechanical and human forms (sometimes called mechanomorphic art), reminiscent of the work of Duchamp and Picabia. The key Cologne Dada artists were Max Ernst (1891 1976) and Johannes Baargeld (a pseudonym based on the German word Bargeld, meaning cash ), both of whom appropriated the Berlin artists collage techniques. Ernst and Baargeld were iconoclasts, not social evangelists, who delighted in submitting their witty low-end irreverent collages to the staid Cologne Kunstverein Exhibition in 1919, creating a scandal. When prohibited from showing there the following year, Ernst mounted a solo exhibition at a nearby brewery, forcing visitors to walk past the lavatory to get to the gallery, where the central work was a sculpture that visitors were instructed to destroy with an axe he provided. Typical of Ernst s work from this very productive period is 1 Copper Plate 1 Zinc Plate 1 Rubber Cloth 2 Calipers 1 Drainpipe Telescope 1 Piping Man (fig. 28.7), a gouache, ink, and pencil drawing on an illustration from a 1914 book about chemistry equipment. With a line here and a dab of paint there, Ernst transformed the picture of laboratory utensils into bizarre robotic figures set in a stark symbol-filled landscape. Perhaps we should say dreamscape, for the glazed-over stares and skewed de Chirico-like perspective, which culminates in a mystifying square, give this little collage an elemental power that suggests some otherworldly sphere one of the imagination. Ernst was influenced by others who had made dream imagery, but he was also familiar with de Chirico s metaphysical paintings, to which he was introduced by his friend Jean Arp. The dreamlike quality of Ernst s image endows his figures with heavy psychological overtones. Not surprisingly, Ernst was fascinated by Sigmund Freud s theories about the unconscious and the importance of dreams. Through Arp, Ernst was put in contact with two leaders of the Paris Dada movement, poets André Breton and Paul Éluard, both 28.7 Max Ernst, 1 Copper Plate 1 Zinc Plate 1 Rubber Cloth 2 Calipers 1 Drainpipe Telescope 1 Piping Man. 1920. Gouache, ink, and pencil on printer paper, 12 * 9" (30.5 * 22.9 cm). Estate of Hans Arp CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 991 of whom had also come under Freud s spell, entranced by the idea that the unconscious contained realities that had been suppressed by civilization. In 1921, they arranged for Ernst to show his Dada collages at a small avant-garde exhibition in Paris, where they made such a sensation he was hailed as the Einstein of painting. The following year, Ernst emigrated to Paris. In 1924, Breton issued his Surrealist Manifesto, anointing Ernst s 1921 show, because of its dreamlike images, as the first Surrealist exhibition. Paris Dada: Man Ray The transition from Dada to Surrealism was well under way by 1922, and it occurred in Paris. Dada had established a foothold in the French capital with the return of Duchamp at the end of 1918 and with the arrival of Picabia from Barcelona in 1919. As in Zurich, the thrust behind Paris Dada came from the literary contingent. Inspired by Tzara s Dada magazine, three young poets Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault founded a journal called Littérature. It was so avant-garde that there was hardly anything in it that the literary establishment would consider literature. In addition to phonetic poems by Tzara, it included Breton and Soupault s collaborative poem Les Champs magnétique ( Magnetic Fields ) of 1920, which was written in a stream-of-consciousness style that was derived from working sessions lasting up to ten hours. One artist who moved in and out of the Paris Dada circle was the independent American Man Ray (1890 1976). He had befriended Duchamp in New York, participated in New York Dada, and followed Duchamp to Paris in 1921. Best known as a photographer, Man Ray was extraordinarily inventive and worked in many mediums, some, such as airbrush painting, being quite innovative. Most important, Man Ray was the first artist to consistently use photography within a Dada context, often using the same conceptual premises, favoring idea over technique, as are found in Duchamp s work, thus freeing the medium from the merely representational restrictions placed on it by fine-art photographers. Man Ray helped establish photography, at least within Dada and Surrealist circles, as a medium that was viewed on a par with painting and sculpture. In 1922, Man Ray had a major impact on the development of photography, as well as on Dada and abstract art, when he popularized the photogram a one-of-a-kind cameraless photograph made by putting objects directly on photographic paper and then exposing both the object and paper to light (fig. 28.8). Solid objects block light from striking the white paper, so they appear white in the image, while the spaces between and around the objects become black, since there is nothing to prevent the light from exposing the paper. Tzara dubbed Man Ray s print a rayograph, and that year, using cover prints (photographic copies of the original print) made by Man Ray, Tzara published a limitededition book, entitled Champs délicieux ( Delicious Fields, a pun on Magnetic Fields ), containing 12 rayographs. Our reproduction is one of these untitled works, which reveals the silhouettes of a brush and comb, a sewing pin, a coil of 992 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D paper, and a strip of fabric, among the identifiable items. The image, like much of Man Ray s work, helps demonstrate the close relationship between the random and defiant art of Dada and the evocative, often sensual, art of Surrealism. The objects appear ghostlike and mysterious and float in a strange environment where darks and lights have been reversed and a haunting overall darkness prevails. Shapes and lines move in and out of dark shadows, sometimes vibrating, as with the brush-and-comb silhouette, other times crisply stated, as in the center oval. Because Man Ray exposed the paper with a light bulb that he moved several times during the process, he created multiple light sources, which caused the edges of some objects to shimmer and allowed other forms to recede back in space instead of just existing as flat silhouettes. His pictures, as with the Surrealist art that would follow, are a magical blend of the real and nonreal. We feel the presence of a real comb and sewing pin, and yet they seem to exist in a poetic otherworldly realm, even evoking the inner world of the mind and black-and-white world of dreams. Just as strange and inexplicable is the relationship of these objects and shapes to one another. 28.8 Man Ray. Untitled, from Champs délicieux. 1922. Gelatin silver print Man Ray also used the same process to make films, which have the same dreamlike quality as his rayographs. At Tzara s invitation, he participated in what turned out to be the final major Dada event in Paris, La Soirée de la Coeur de la Barbe (The Bearded Heart Soirée) in 1923. To make his film, Man Ray sprinkled sand on a segment of unexposed film, and, nails, and tacks on another, creating a three-minute abstract movie titled The Return to Reason (to view the film, visit www.myartslab.com), an ironic title because the hallucinatory flickering of white objects floating in pitch-blackness creates a sense of chaos that is far from rational. To flesh out the film, Man Ray added segments of a carousel photographed at night, a tic-tac-toe-gridlike mobile dancing with its own shadow, and a nude model dissolved in harsh striped lighting, which are equally abstract and dreamlike. Like the rayographs, the film represented a new way to view the world, one that was essentially Surrealist, although the term had yet to be coined or the movement recognized. This short movie, Man Ray s first, not only introduced film to the Parisian fine-art world, but it also helped spawn a flurry of experimental films by other artists. Shortly after Man Ray s movie was screened that evening, a riot broke out when Breton, Éluard, and Soupault, all uninvited, stormed the stage screaming that Dada was dead. Though Dada continued to provide the intellectual foundation for challenging art throughout the century, the spirit of the moment was clearly shifting away from chance and nonsense to the psychological investigations of Surrealism. Breton s manifesto proposed several ways to tap into the unconscious. He encouraged the use of dreamlike images, the juxtaposition of unrelated objects that would jar the imagination, and stream-of-consciousness writing. He called for the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality. He emphasized the concept of creating the marvelous, images, either verbal or visual, that are mysterious, chance, and poetic, and that jolt the audience into a new, unknown plane of reality surreality. Surrealism was first a literary style. Breton traced its roots to several sources, including the comte de Lautréamont s 1869 novel Chants de Maldoror, which included wondrous passages of surreal images, the most famous perhaps being as beautiful as a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. Breton s literary circle delighted in such chance encounters of words, even devising a game in which each participant provided words for a sentence, not knowing what had already been written. One such game produced The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine, and Exquisite Corpse became the game s name. Surrealist visual artists played Exquisite Corpse as well. Folding a piece of paper, each artist drew on his or her segment without seeing what the others had done, only where they had left off. The result was a provocative image of unrelated objects or a strange form. But visual art had little place in Breton s manifesto, and visual artists were only mentioned as a footnote, appearing in a single sentence. Among those listed were Ernst, Man Ray, de Chirico, and Picasso. SURREALISM Surrealism existed in spirit, if not in name, well before 1924, but the movement was formally launched by Breton that year with his Surrealist Manifesto. Surrealism, Breton wrote, is pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other way, the true functioning of thought. Thought expressed in the absence of any control exerted by reason, and outside all moral and aesthetic considerations. Banished was the Neoclassical god of reason, the sureness of logic, and the need to portray an observable reality. Also gone was Dada nihilism, replaced by an intensive exploration of the unconscious. Surrealists argued that we see only a surface reality. More important was uncovering the reality that, as Freud maintained, resided in the deep-seated secrets and desires of the unconscious mind. For Freud, the basic human desires, particularly the sexual ones, that define our individual identities are repressed by the conventions of civilization but are revealed in dreams. Random dream images are, for Freud, charged with meaning and provide the royal road to the unconscious. They contain symbols of our desires and anxieties. Using his own and his patients dreams as raw material, Freud decoded dream images into what he believed to be their true meaning, claiming sexual desires or concerns were often disguised as ordinary objects. A vase, for example, is a symbol of female sexuality, the vagina, while a tall building or a mountain suggests phallic maleness. Picasso and Surrealism Perhaps the most surprising name on Breton s list is Picasso s. The Dada artists found little of interest in the analytic logical thinking of the Cubists. But Breton saw Picasso s Cubism as the first step toward loosening the grip of reality on the artistic imagination, and he declared Picasso s 1907 Les Demoiselles d Avignon (see fig. 27.5) one of the first Surrealist images. Beginning in the mid1920s, Picasso s work paralleled that of the Surrealists. They shared many symbols and myths, mostly sexual, including the female praying mantis, which eats it male partner upon mating, and the suffering, tortured male minotaur, which has the head of a bull on the body of man. But Picasso was very independent, and though he provided artwork for Surrealist publications and participated in some Surrealist shows, he did not consider himself a Surrealist. With Breton s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, the primal sexual forces seen in Les Demoiselles and smoldering beneath the surface of many of his Synthetic Cubist paintings of the mid- to late 1910s burst into the foreground of Picasso s works, as seen in Three Dancers (fig. 28.9), made in 1925, less than a year after Breton published his manifesto. These are not the Three Graces, but rather disquieting nudes engaged in a strange performance. The figure in the center the most conventionally rendered appears at one moment to be completing a pirouette, at the next moment CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 993 a midnight Dionysian bacchanal at the next. What remains consistent, however, is the pivotal role of the female body, whether as a symbol of erotic athleticism, threatening sexual frenzy, or spiritual suffering. Just as Freud attributed to the female body the power to incite desire as well as dread in men, Picasso, like the Surrealists, places the female form at the service of a male viewer s contradictory libidinal impulses. S C U L P T U R E Picasso also turned to sculpture to express his urge to portray the unseen deep-seated psychological passions that drive physical urges, and it led him to revolutionize sculpture for a second time (see page 954). By late 1928, he was welding metal, which he experimented with for the next five years, starting a trend that by the 1940s established welded steel as a major sculptural process rivaling cast bronze and chiseled stone. Picasso began working in the medium when he decided to make sculpture based on the linear drawing of the figures in his WELDED 28.9 Pablo Picasso, Three Dancers. 1925. Oil on canvas, 7'1*2" + 4'81*4" (2.15 + 1.4 m). Tate Gallery, London to be crucified. The contorted figure to the left has been reduced to an assemblage of abstruse hieroglyphic forms, which never quite coalesce into a single meaning. Her head is shaped like a quarter-moon, and it has been placed against a backdrop of a night sky filled with stars as represented by the abstracted fleursde-lis of the wallpaper. Some scholars claim the head resembles a Torres Strait, New Guinea mask that Picasso had in his personal collection of tribal art, and is thus a reflection of the artist s interest in the expressive primordial power of so-called primitive art, which Surrealists felt penetrated into the deepest recesses of the mind. The figure on the right is the most sedate or controlled of the three, causing some art historians to view the dancers as emblems of love, sex, and death. At every turn, Cubist fracturing dissolves the forms into disorienting shapes and colors, permitting multiple interpretations of the scene. What seems to be a dance rehearsal in a light-filled studio at one moment turns into 994 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 28.10 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman. 1929 30. Painted iron, sheet metal, springs, and colanders, 393*8 + 141*2 + 231*4" (100 + 37 + 59 cm). Musée Picasso, Paris which, like Picasso s Head of a Woman, project primitive, psychological, and hallucinatory qualities. Here, the sculptor reduces the figure to a pernicious clamplike mouth, stalklike eyes, spiky hair, and frazzled face (or is it the mind?), all attached to a moonlike crescent not only suggesting a skull but also the cosmos, a parallel we saw Jean Arp make as well in The Entombment of the Birds and Butterflies (see fig. 28.1) Surrealism in Paris: Spurring the Imagination In 1925, Breton, like everyone, was having doubts about the possibility of Surrealist painting or sculpture. Many argued that the visual arts, unlike writing, did not allow for a stream of consciousness since artists always had the work in front of them and, while creating, could see where they had been and think about where they were at that moment. The resulting imagery might seem surreal, but the method was not. Initially, many of the visual artists Breton championed relied on automatic drawing and chance to produce their images. In late 1925, Breton organized the first Surrealist exhibition, which featured Ernst, Picasso, André Masson, and Joan Miró, but also included de Chirico, Klee, Man Ray, and Arp. The use of automatic drawing had been initiated by the French painter André Masson (1896 1987) the year before, in 1924. In this process, Masson first made a series of lines while in a trancelike state, lines that he then used to spur the imagination to further develop the image. In 1926, he began prompting his unconscious by also randomly putting glue on his canvases and then sprinkling sand over the surface, the sand adhering where there was glue. The result of these chance techniques was the creation of mysterious environments inhabited by primitive organic forms, suggesting both the origin of life and the powerful universal urges that drive it. Not to be outdone by Masson, Ernst in 1925 developed frottage, one of several devices he developed throughout his career to spur his imagination. Frottage consists of rubbing graphite, crayon, or charcoal over paper placed on an object, such as floorboards, chair caning, or pressed flowers, and then discerning an image in the irregular pattern of the wood grain or in the botanical geometry. When wiping paint over canvas, the technique is called grattage. In either case, the process often spurred Ernst s imagination to create a primeval forest filled with birds, animals, and bizarre, frightening creatures. While the pictures often have a mythic force similar to Masson s imagery, they are also filled with a frenetic sexual energy. Grattage is the basis for Die Ganze Stadt (The Entire City) (fig. 28.12) of 1935 36, one of several paintings made on this theme at about this time for which Ernst placed canvas over boards and then rubbed dried paint over the surface. The result in each case is an austere and massive Mayan-like structure evoking an extinct monumental civilization, swallowed by the forces of nature and time, as suggested in this picture by the dominance of the enormous acidic-colored celestial body in the sky and the crawling animallike plantlife with lush buds in the MAX ERNST 28.11 Julio González, Head. ca. 1935. Wrought iron, 173*4 + 151*4" (45.1 + 38.7 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase (266.1937) current paintings, figures that were in effect skeletal stick figures. The resulting three-dimensional sculptures were made up of metal rods that represented the painted lines, and they looked like a line drawing in space. Gradually, Picasso turned from metal rods to working with metal in a variety of shapes and sizes, including the use of found objects, as seen in Head of a Woman (fig. 28.10) from 1929 30, which was made from colanders, springs, iron, and sheet metal. Picasso is still drawing in space, as seen in the hair, face, skull, and body if this is indeed what these abstract shapes are. He has pared his figure down to a barebones essence, peeling away the superficial layers of physicality to reveal the psychological core of the woman that lies beneath, a rather strident, threatening psychology that reflects a male perception and fear of the opposite sex. The sculpture s overall resemblance to African masks, and the use of tribal hieroglyphic notations for different parts of the body, such as the stick legs, reinforce its elemental quality. To do his welding, Picasso hired fellow Spaniard Julio González (1876 1942), who had learned the skill in a Renault automobile factory. By the 1930s, González was making his own work, such as Head (fig. 28.11) of around 1935, which would garner him a reputation as the world s foremost practitioner of welded sculpture. González specialized in figures and heads, CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 995 28.12 Max Ernst, Die Ganze Stadt (The Entire City). 1935 36. il on canvas, 231*2 + 313*4" (60 + 81 cm). Kunsthaus, Zurich foreground. A dark mood of twilight prevails, underscoring a sense of futility about humans trying to permanently achieve the goals of their primary, elemental desires. A Catalan from Barcelona, Joan Miró (1893 1983) came to Paris in 1920 and took a studio next to Masson s. Soon after, through a hole in their adjoining wall, Masson whispered to Miró to go see Breton, not Picasso because he was the future. Within a short time Miró had abandoned Cubism and begun painting from his imagination. (Actually, he claimed he was working from hallucinations brought on by starvation I was living on a few dry figs a day. ) He adopted Masson s wiry line and the childlike drawing and atmospheric quality of Klee (see fig. 27.16). Miró s pictures became abstractions of biomorphic and geometric forms set against a minimal color field that suggested a landscape or watery environment. Miró s paintings became increasingly abstract, as seen in Composition (fig. 28.13), a 1933 oil. The work was one in a series based on collages on cardboard made from images cut out of catalogues with the idea that the shape JOAN MIRÓ 996 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D and even details of the objects would fire his imagination. The setting of Composition is a hazy atmospheric environment of washes, suggesting the same kind of primeval landscape as in Masson s abstractions. This eerie world is populated by strange curvilinear floating forms that suggest prehistoric and microscopic creatures, as well as spirits, ghosts, or souls. We can even find a story in places, such as two figures playing with or fighting over a ball in the upper left corner. Or are they? Other features in the painting express ideas about sex, struggle, and fear. Miró uses a minimal vocabulary, which includes color as well as form, to create a mythic image evoking humans most primal urges and needs. Representational Surrealism: Magritte and Dalí Initially, Breton s strongest support was for an abstract Surrealism that was based on chance, spontaneity, and trance. Over the next decade, however, artists with all kinds of styles would move in and out of the movement, most abandoning it, in part because of 28.13 Joan Miró, Composition. 1933. Oil on canvas, 511*4 + 31*2" (130.2 + 11.3 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Ela Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund the group s strong socialist and Communist stance, but also because of Breton himself, who was rather controlling and functioned as though he were the Pope of Surrealism, capriciously anointing or not anointing and even excommunicating artists as Surrealists for the flimsiest of reasons. By the late 1920s, more and more artists were working in a representational or quasi-representational style. One such was René Magritte (1898 1967), who was from Brussels. There, he was a member of the Surrealist circle, a group of artists and intellectuals who were also very involved RENÉ MAGRITTE with Communism. Magritte spent 1927 to 1930 in Paris, but Breton never officially recognized him as a Surrealist. He then returned to Belgium, where he spent the remainder of his life, not achieving fame until late in his career. His The False Mirror (fig. 28.14), painted in 1928, reads like a manifesto of Surrealism, proclaiming the superior reality of the unconscious mind. We see an uncanny close-up of an eye, which reflects a distant sky. The iris, however, is transformed into an eerie eclipsed sun, behind which, Magritte suggests, lies the unconscious, which perceives the reality of things. The eye absorbs only the visual, not the real, world. ené Magritte, The False Mirror. 1928. 28.14 Oil on canvas, 211*4 + 311*8" (54 + 81 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New ork CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 997 28.15 Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. A still from the film An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou). 1929. France Arriving in Paris a few years after Magritte was another major representational Surrealist. Salvador Dalí (1904 1989) came from Madrid, where he had already developed a meticulously detailed Realist style heavily based on the psycho- SALVADOR DALÍ logical complexes that Freud described in his writings. He made a grand entrance into the world of Parisian Surrealism with his 17minute film An Andalusian Dog (see www.myartslab.com), which he made with fellow Spaniard, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900 1983). The movie opens with Buñuel on a balcony with a woman and, as a cloud mysteriously passes behind them, the camera goes to a close-up of an eye, we assume the woman s, which is then dramatically sliced by a straight razor. This opening scene has been interpreted as a reference to the Oedipus complex and fear of castration, which is symbolized by a fear of blindness, two major themes in Freud s writings about male psychological development. The entire film, which consists of one unexplainable, bizarre sequence after another, lends itself to similar Freudian analysis. To produce their Surrealist effects, Dalí and Buñuel rely on montage, juxtaposing unrelated objects to create dream sequences that constantly put objects into new contexts designed to generate the marvelous and to jolt the unconscious. In one famous sequence, a needley sea urchin morphs into a woman s hairy armpit; in another, a man s mouth first disappears, then becomes a woman s crotch; and in yet other, ants swam over a hand appearing in a crack in a door. In yet another famous sequence, the film s protagonist drags across a room two priests and two grand pianos, each containing a putrefying dead donkey 28.16 Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas, 91*2 + 13" (24.1 + 33 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously (162.1934) 998 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D (fig. 2 .15), a sequence suggesting among other things the admonishments of the church about sex and how they suppress basic human urges. Similar themes and Freudian psychology appear in Dalí s visual art. Dalí made his paintings using a process he called paranoiac-critical [a] spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretative-critical association of delirious phenomena. He created paintings in a frenzy, a selfinduced paranoid state where he would begin with a single object in mind. Then, he would respond to that object and so on, developing a mysterious image reflecting an irrational process that released the unconscious. The Persistence of Memory (fig. 28.16) began with the strange amorphous head with an elongated trailing neck lying on the ground. A plate of soft Camembert cheese then inspired him to paint the soft pocket watches. While allowing no certain final reading, the picture evokes a host of associations, the most obvious being the crippling passage of time that leads to inevitable deterioration and death, although the title suggests we are looking backward to the past, not forward to the future. Many scholars interpret the flaccid watches as symbols of impotence. In any case, Dalí has created a provocative dreamscape of mysterious objects that can be read as metaphors for the deepest desires, fears, and anxieties, especially sexual, of the mind, and that can unleash multiple interpretations from a viewer s own unconscious. Surrealism and Photography Photographers, following Man Ray s lead, were discovering that their medium, which could both manipulate reality and create dreamlike sequences, were perfect vehicles for Surrealism. Many major photographers, not in Breton s circle, were deeply affected by Surrealism. One of the most famous outsiders was the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, who neither manipulated nor staged his images. HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON Cartier-Bresson (1908 2004) made some of the most extraordinary images of the twentieth century. Trained as a painter, he turned to photography in the early 1930s when, influenced by the Surrealists, he sought to find the extraordinary in the ordinary and decided that the best means for accomplishing this was through photography. Armed with the new small, portable 35mm eica camera, he took to the street to photograph what he called the decisive moment, which he defined as the creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture, and using intuition you ask your artistic question and decide almost simultaneously. We can see this decisive moment in his Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (fig. 28.17) of 1932. All over the world, Cartier-Bresson made photograph after photograph that miraculously captured the same supernatural magic we see in this fleeting, ghostlike image of a silhouetted man inexplicably suspended in midair. A master of strong value contrasts, CartierBresson was able to transform stones, ladder, and arcs into strange hieroglyphic shapes that materialize out of the water. ike Dalí and Ernst, he establishes a powerful eerie dialogue among objects, 28.17 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare. 1932. Gelatin silver print such as the man, clock, ladder, and reflections, sending the mind on an endless journey of associations and interpretations. The Surrealist Object When Joan Miró began work on his Composition, he started with an image that, like a dream, took him on a journey of psychological exploration and formal invention. Surrealists created objects that would initiate such journeys for viewers as well as for themselves. In fact, some of the most succinct Surrealist artworks were fetishistic objects, mysterious poetic things, that were found and created, and had no narrative, but jolted the unconscious and spawned infinite associations, mostly sexual and often violent. As early as 1921, Man Ray had already made one of the first Surrealist objects, The Gift (fig. 28.18), a gift for the composer Erik Satie. The work is nothing more than tacks glued onto the flat side of a clothing iron. It is a shocking dislocation of both a household item and hardware that creates something unidentifiable, without logic or narrative, but filled with innuendoes of violence, pain, and sex. CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 999 she covered a teacup, saucer, and spoon with gazelle fur and called it Object (fig. 28.19), although Breton, when he included it in a Surrealist exhibition, retitled it Luncheon in Fur, punning on Manet s sexually fraught Luncheon on the Grass (see fig. 25.10). Oppenheim presents us with eroticism offered and eroticism denied, for, individually, fur and beverage are sensual, but juxtaposed as they are, they are disconcerting, if not outright repulsive. The fur anthropomorphizes the porcelain and spoon, and suggests, among other things, pubic hair. The work is designed to trigger the unconscious, to evoke infinite associations that deal with the repressed realities of eroticism, sensuality, desire, and anxiety. ing minimal means, Oppenheim created the marvelous that takes a viewer into the realm of the surreal. ORGANIC SCULPTURE OF THE 1930S 28.18 Man ay, The Gift. 1921 (1958 replica). Painted flatiron with row of 13 tacks with heads glued to the bottom, 1*8 + 35*8 + 41*2" (15.5 + 9.2 + 11.43 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New ork. James Thrall Soby Fund (249.19) Probably the most famous Surrealist object was made by Meret Oppenheim (1913 1985). Oppenheim, the daughter of a Jungian psychologist, went to Paris as an 18-year-old in 1932. For a period she was Man ay s model and assistant. Inspired by an off-hand comment she made when lunching with Picasso in 193, The abstraction of such Surrealists as Masson and Miró inspired many artists to search for universal truths residing beneath the surface of things. As had the omantic landscape painters of the previous century, they focused on nature, trying to pry loose the unseen pulse of the cosmos that coursed through the natural world. To reveal these higher truths and realities, a number of artists, including Alexander Calder in Paris and Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in ngland, turned to working with abstract organic forms. Often, they showed in Surrealist exhibitions and were occasionally labeled Surrealists, especially since their work dealt with hidden realities. But despite many parallels, their interests were quite different from Breton s as they evolved in the 1930s. Breton was more concerned with the psychology of anxiety, desire, and sex, while the artists working with abstract organic forms were more interested in the powerful forces of the universe. With the exception of Calder, they did not use chance or 28.19 Meret Oppenheim, Object (Luncheon in Fur). 193. Fur-covered teacup, saucer, and spoon; diameter of cup 43*4" (12.1 cm); diameter of saucer 93*8" (23.8 cm); length of spoon 8" (20.3 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New ork 1000 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D other devices to spur their imaginations. In some respects, their work relates more to Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian than to the card-carrying Breton Surrealists. Some artists, like Jean Arp, whom we met in a Dda context but who became one of the first Surrealists, abandoned Breton s circle in the early 1930s and joined an international Paris-based group called AbstractionCréation, which was dedicated to abstract art. Similarly, Miró as well, without changing style, quit the Surrealist movement, claiming he was not a Surrealist. Alexander Calder in Paris Arp convinced his friend Alexander Calder (1898 1976) to become a member of Abstraction-Création as well. Calder, an American from Philadelphia, had settled in Paris in 1926, where he also befriended Miró and the abstract Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whom we shall meet shortly. In the early 1930s, he started making mobiles, a name that Dchamp gave his kinetic sculptures. Calder s first mobiles were propelled by motors, but later mobiles were constructed of painted sheet metal attached to metal wires that were hinged together and perfectly balanced. With the slightest gust of air, the mobile seems to glide, tilting and turning in space. Some of his mobiles make a chiming sound as hammers periodically swing around to strike gonglike elements. The mobiles vary in size from tabletop models to others with a 30-foot span that are suspended from a ceiling. ike Miró and Arp, Calder generally used organic shapes, as seen in obster Trap and ish Tail (fig. 28.20) from 1939. The forms suggest marine life, but generally they are abstract and, like Miró s paintings, simultaneously suggest the microscopic and macroscopic. The black forms in obster Trap can be seen as a school of fish, but viewed together suggest something skeletal, even primeval. Calder was inspired to develop kinetic sculpture to suggest growth and cosmic energy. He kept his colors basic, generally using primary and secondary colors, as well as black and white. All colors stem from these, so Calder s palette symbolized the basic building blocks of life, a notion he shared with Mondrian (see page 1005), whose Paris studio he visited in 1930. 28.20 Alexander Calder, obster Trap and Fish Tail. 1939. Painted steel wire and sheet aluminum, approx. 8'6" * 9'6" (2.59 * 2.89 m). Museum of Modern Art, New York, Commissioned by the Advisory Committee for the Stairwell of the Museum CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1001 Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in England The organic abstract style favored by Miró, Arp, and Calder jumped the English Channel in the 1930s, surfacing in the work of Henry Moore (1898 1986) and Barbara Hepworth. Moore studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 1921 to 1925, and in the following five years, from extensive museum visits in England and on the Continent, and through art publications, he digested the contemporary art of Brancusi, Arp, Miró, and Picasso. He was also influenced by the period s intense interest in non-Western art, including the Pre-Columbian art of Mexico. By the early 1930s, Moore s mature style had emerged, represented here by Recumbent Figure (fig. 28.21), made in 1938. The work is reminiscent of a Classical reclining river-goddess, although it is based more directly on Pre-Columbian figures. The sculptor is more interested in projecting the elemental and universal than in Classical antiquity as he explores the associations between the forms of nature and the shape of the figure. We see a woman, but the stone retains its identity as stone, looking like a rock that has been eroded by the elements for millions of years. Moore ingeniously suggests that figure and rock are one and the same, even making the female form harmonize with the striations of the stone. The universal forces present in the rock are transferred to the figure, which becomes an earth-goddess or fertility figure. The undulation of her abstract body virtually transforms her into a landscape. Adding to the mystical aura is Moore s brilliant interplay between solid and void, each having the same weight in the composition and evoking the womblike mystery of caves or tidal pools embedded in seashore rocks. Moore felt comfortable showing works similar to Recumbent Figure at the International Surrealist Exhibition held in London in 1936; he may have seen an affinity with the Surrealists in his attempts to express a higher reality lying beneath the surface of things. But Moore felt equally comfortable exhibiting in shows of abstract art, and his sculpture poses a classic case of the problematic nature of labeling art. Barbara Hepworth (1903 1975) identified entirely with abstraction, and was a member of Abstraction-Création. She traveled to Paris in 1933 and visited the studios of Arp and Brancusi; she also met Picasso. She was in Paris again in 1935 and met Mondrian. Like Moore, who was with her for a time at the Leeds School of Art and was a lifelong friend, she was interested in investing her abstract forms with a sense of the unseen forces of nature. She began working in abstraction in the early 1930s, and within a few years her sculpture became geometric. Instead of seeming hard-edged and mechanical, however, they are organic and mysterious, a quality that became even stronger after she moved to a cottage overlooking St. Ives Bay in Cornwall on the southwest tip of England when war broke out in 1939. Her sculpture was a personal response to nature. (See Primary Source, page 1003.) In Sculpture with Color (Deep Blue and Red) [6] (fig. 28.22), the egglike form, vaguely reminiscent of Brancusi s heads and 28.21 Henry Moore, Recumbent Figure. 1938. Green Horton stone, length approx. 54" (137.2 cm). Tate Gallery, London 1002 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D On Sculpture (1937) In a 1937 book of artists statements, British abstract sculptor Barbara Hepworth made the following statement about how her work reflects universal truths and an individual s relationship to nature. T he whole life force is in the vision which includes all phantasy, all intuitive imagination, and all conscious selection from experience. Ideas are born through a perfect balance of our conscious and unconscious life and they are realized through this same fusion and equilibrium. The choice of one idea from several, and the capacity to relate the whole of our past experience to the present idea is our conscious mind: our sensitivity to the unfolding of the idea in substance, in relation to the very act of breathing, is our unconscious intuition. Contemporary constructive work does not lose by not having particular human interest, drama, fear or religious emotion. It moves us profoundly because it represents the whole of the artist s experience and vision, his whole sensibility to enduring ideas, his whole desire for a realization of these ideas in life and a complete rejection of the transitory and local forces of destruction. It is an absolute belief in man, in landscape and in the universal relationship of constructive ideas. The abstract forms of his work are now unconscious and intuitive his individual manner of expression. His conscious life is bent on discovering a solution to human difficulties by solving his own thought permanently, and in relation to his medium. [Abstraction] is no escapism, no ivory tower, no isolated pleasure in proportion and space it is an unconscious manner of expressing our belief in a possible life. The language of colour and form is universal and not one for a special class (though this may have been in the past) it is a thought which gives the same life, the same expansion, the same universal freedom to everyone. PRIMARY SOURCE Barbara Hepworth (1903 1975) Source: Circle International Survey of Constructive Art, ed. J. L. Martin, B. Nicholson, and N. Gabo (London: Faber and Faber, 1937) CREATING UTOPIAS 28.22 Barbara Hepworth, Sculpture with Color (Deep Blue and Red) [6]. 1943. Wood, painted white and blue, with red strings, on a white painted wooden base, 11 * 10" (27.9 * 26 cm). Private collection newborns, is an elemental shape, suggesting fertility and birth. The carved wood is finely polished and covered with an immaculate sheen of white paint, producing a surface that, like the shape of the work, evokes purity. In addition, the white of the shell heightens the mystery of the dark cavity, which harbors a sky or water of deep blue. The stretched red strings have the intensity of the sun s rays and perpetual energy of life forces. Hepworth herself said, the strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills. While Dada and Surrealism constituted a major force for the period between the wars, they were not the only movements. Many twentieth-century artists remained committed to exploring abstract art. Surrealists and abstract artists often shared similar social goals: Both groups championed individual freedom, and both wished to undermine bourgeois values, to eradicate nationalism, to destroy capitalism, and to create a classless society. (See www.myartslab.com.) Many Dadaists and Surrealists were socialists who also participated in Communist Party activities. Similarly, many abstract artists were socialists and Communists, but they viewed abstract art itself as a vehicle for creating a utopian society. Two major centers of geometric abstraction emerged simultaneously: Constructivism appeared with the Russian Revolution in 1917, and De Stijl (The Style) appeared in Amsterdam. A third center was the Bauhaus in Germany, an art school founded in 1919 that succeeded as a significant force in the following decade and was often influenced by Constructivist refugees from Russia and De Stijl artists. Constructivism and the Bauhaus were especially influenced by the period s belief that industry and machines would create a better world, and the inter-war era, which indeed was dominated by tremendous technological advances, is often referred to as The Machine Age. Russian Constructivism: Productivism and Utilitarianism The most direct connection between abstract art and radical politics came in the revolutionary society that developed in Russia. There, before and after the October Revolution of 1917, artists committed themselves to developing new art forms that they CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1003 hoped would bring about a new utopian society. Building on the innovations of Malevich s Suprematism (see page 9), several movements followed, each attempting to put art at the service of the new revolutionary society. As Malevich was developing his Suprematist painting in Moscow, a fellow ussian, ladimir Tatlin (1885 1953), was working in Berlin and Paris. n 1914, Tatlin visited Picasso s Paris studio and saw his constructions (see page 954). !pon returning to ussia, he then made his own constructed reliefs (fig. 28.23), which he called counterreliefs, for which he used cardboard, wood, and metal covered with a variety of materials, including glazes, glass, and plaster. Similar to ussian icons and Malevich s Black Square (see fig. 27.23), some of the counterreliefs spanned corners, in effect using the space of the room to create a small environment. !"like Picasso s constructions, which were generally musical instruments, Tatlin s were nonobjective, that is, they were totally abstract like Malevich s paintings, and not meant to evoke real objects. Following Tatlin s lead, other ussian sculptors began making abstract sculpture from geometric forms, a movement that in 1922 was formally called Constructivism. With the Bolshevik evolution in 1917, Tatlin s attitude toward his art changed. He embraced Communism and focused his efforts on supporting the party s goal of creating a utopian society. He worked for the Soviet #ducation Commissariat and turned his attention to architecture and engineering. A major component of his teachings was his passionate belief in the utility of modern machinery, the democratic quality of mass-produced objects, and the efficiency of industrial materials. Technological modernity was the future and the new religion, and industrial efficiency and materials had to be incorporated into art, design, and architecture, where they would produce a new, better, classless world. n other words, the social revolution had to be complemented with an aesthetic revolution. According to Tatlin s theory VAIMIR TATIN 28$2+ %ladimir Tatlin, Corner Counterrelief. 1915. Mixed media, 311*2 + 59 + 291*2" (80 + 150 + 75 cm). Presumed destroyed 1004 , A RT I - T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 28$24 %ladimir Tatlin, Project for Monument to the Third International. 1919 20. Wood, iron, and glass, height 20' (&.10 m). Destroyed* contemporary photograph of Constructivist Productivism, everything from appliances to clothing, from living spaces to theaters now had to be machinelike and streamlined. Form must follow function and objects were to be stripped of all ornamentation, which was associated with bourgeois values and aristocratic ostentation. Tatlin s most famous work is his Project for Monument to the Third International (fig. 28.24), begun in 1919 and exhibited in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow in December 1920. The project was actually a model for a building which was never built that was supposed to be 1,300 feet high, which would have made it the tallest structure in the world at that time. t was to have a metal spiral frame tilted at an angle and encompassing a glass cube, cylinder, and cone. These steel and glass units, housing conference and meeting rooms, were to revolve, making a complete revolution once a year, month, and day, respectively. The industrial materials of steel and glass and the dynamic, kinetic nature of the work symbolized the new Machine Age and the dynamism of the Bolshevik evolution. The tower was to function as a propaganda center for the Communist Third 28.25 Alexander @odchenko, Advertisement: Books! 1925. @odchenko Archive, Moscow, @ussia /nternational, an organization devoted to world revolution, and its rotating, ascending spiral symbolized the aspirations of Communism. Following Tatlin s dictum of Art into Life, many artists, at least temporarily if not completely, gave up making conventional art in order to design functional objects that would help create the great classless utopia. Both Aleksandr 0odchenko (1891 1951) and his wife 2arvara Fedorovna Stepanova (1894 1958) fall into this category. /n the early 1920s, 0odchenko stopped making Suprematist paintings and Constructivist assemblages to focus on graphic design, as seen here in a poster promoting literacy (fig. 28729). We are far removed from the organic and human Art Nouveau posters of Toulouse-Lautrec (see fig. 21.8), for example. /nstead, a bold mechanical geometry prevails, with a nearly spaceless image pressed to the surface. <ven the letters are austere and geometric. Bold color creates an energy that is reinforced by the design, where the word Books, for example, is shaped like a megaphone that emits the phrase /n All Spheres of Knowledge. At the time, Stepanova was the designer for a Moscow textile factory. /n the sportswear reproduced here (fig. 2872=), we again see bright colors and a simple yet energetic machinelike geometry. There is no ornamentation or reference to the past, nothing that could be associated with any class, time period, ethnic type, or region. Confronted with the problem of creating a new society, the Constructivist designers invented a new graphic language, one that was distinctly modern, utilitarian, and classless. De Stijl and Universal Order 1917 in Amsterdam, Piet Mondrian (1872 1944), with painter Theo van Doesburg (1883 1931) and several other artists and architects, founded a movement called De Stijl (The Style). Architect Gerrit 0ietveld (1888 1914) joined the group in 1919. Though not backed by a revolutionary government, as were the 28.26 Aarvara Fedorovna Stepanova, Design for Sportswear. 1923. Gouache and ink on paper, 11G*8 + 81*2" (30.2 + 21.7 cm). Collection Alexander Lavrentiev 0ussian artists, their goal was every bit as radical and utopian, for De Stijl artists sought to create, through geometric abstraction, total environments that were so perfect they embodied a universal harmony. >?like their 0ussian counterparts, their mission was literally spiritual. Driven by Mondrian and 2an Doesburg s intense commitment to Theosophy, De Stijl artists, as did the Communists, sought a universal order that would make nationalism obsolete. They called their style the /nternational Style, applying it most often to a new architecture of glass and steel that was modern, pure, and universal, with no national identification. /n P I E T M O N D R I A N /n the magazine De Stijl, the group s publication, the artist Piet Mondrian (1872 1944) presented his theory of art in a series of articles. (See Primary Source, page 1007.) His philosophy was based on Theosophy (see page 941), which he was CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1005 square canvas is assigned its own identity. Every line exists in its own right, not as a means of defining the color rectangles. (The thickness of the lines often varies in his paintings, a function of individual identity.) Each component in the painting sits on the same plane on the surface there is no foreground or background, no one object sitting on top of another. Despite this perfectly interlocking surface, the painting has a feeling of tremendous space, even of infinity, largely due to the rectangles expanding off the edges of the canvas. Space and mass have merged into a harmonious whole in what Mondrian called dynamic equilibrium, where everything is energized yet balanced. Mondrian has attempted to capture the complexity of the universe the individuality of its infinite components and the harmony and spiritual sameness that holds everything together. Mondrian did endless variations of these motifs. Even the color did not change, since these elementary hues, from which all colors are derived, are symbolic of the building blocks of the cosmos. But in principle, painting was not the end product of Mondrian s aesthetic program. He considered it just a stop-gap measure until perfect abstract environments of architecture, furniture, and objects embodying all of these same principles could be achieved. Until then, the world needed his painting. 28.27 Piet Mondrian, Composition No.II/Composition I// Composition en Rouge, Bleu et Jaune (Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow). 19J0. Oil on canvas, 201*8 + 201*8Q ST1 + T1 cm). The Fukuoka City Bank Ltd., Japan. © 2009 MondrianWHoltzman Trust, cWo HCR International, Warrenton, Xirginia, USA interested in before his move to Paris in 1911. After returning to neutral Amsterdam during the Great War, he was further influenced by the ideas of mystical lay philosopher and close acquaintance M. H. J. Schoenmaekers and especially Schoenmaekers s book New Image of the World, the only book other than his own publications in his library. Schoenmaekers argued that there was an underlying mathematical structure to the universe that constituted true reality. He believed that an artist could access and present this structure through rational manipulations of geometric forms. Mondrian developed an art based on such geometry and, using Schoenmaekers s term, he called it Neo-Plasticism, meaning New Plasticism. By plastic in painting, he meant that the world of the painting had a plastic, or three-dimensional, reality of its own that corresponded to the harmonious plastic reality of the universe. In other words, he sought to replicate in his art the unseen underlying structure of the cosmos. Beginning in 1917, Mondrian struggled to achieve this using total geometric abstraction, and only succeeded in his efforts upon returning to Paris in late 1919. After establishing his style, he pretty much retained it for the rest of his life, as seen in Composition en Rouge, Bleu et Jaune (fig. 28.27) of 19H0. His paintings, which are always asymmetrical, are remarkable for their perfect harmony. Mondrian very precisely gives every element in his painting equal weight. Each line and rectangle in this 1006 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D Mondrian s De Stijl colleagues sought to implement his theories in architecture and interior design. In 1917, Gerrit Rietveld (1888 1964), a furniture maker who became a self-taught architect, designed the Red-Blue chair (fig. 28.28), representing the first attempt to apply Neo-Plasticism to the GERRIT RIETVELD 28.28 Gerrit Rietveld. Interior of Schröder House, with Red-Blue chair, Utrecht, Holland. 1924 From Natural Reality and Abstract Reality (1919) This is an excerpt from an essay originally published in the magazine De Stijl in 1919. Here Mondrian explains how Neo-Plastic painting, using an abstract vocabulary, captures universal harmony. T he cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things, and his life is becoming more and more abstract. Natural (external) things become more and more automatic, and we observe that our vital attention fastens more and more on internal things. The life of the truly modern man is neither purely materialistic nor purely emotional. It manifests itself rather as a more autonomous life of the human mind becoming conscious of itself. Natural man although a unity of body, mind and soul exhibits a changed consciousness_ every expression of his life has today a different aspect, that is, an aspect more positively abstract. It is the same with art. Art will become the product of another duality in man_ the product of a cultivated externality and of an inwardness deepened and more conscious. As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form. The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty` he is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal. The new plastic idea cannot, therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation, although the latter does always indicate the universal to a degree, or at least conceals it within. This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and color. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color. We find that in nature all relations are dominated by a single primoridal relation, which is defined by the opposition of two extremes. Abstract plasticism represents this primordial relation in a precise manner by means of the two positions which form the right angle. This positional relation is the most balanced of all, since it expresses in a perfect harmony the relation between two extremes, and contains all other relations. If we conceive these two extremes as manifestations of interiority and exteriority, we will find that in the new plasticism the tie uniting mind and life is not broken` thus, far from considering it a negation of truly living life we shall see a reconciliation of the matter-mind dualism. PRIMARY SOURCE Piet Mondrian (1872 1944) Source: De Stijl, Vol. I, 1919 decorative arts. One of the more uncomfortable chairs ever made, its emphasis was on spiritual aesthetics, employing flat planes and primary colors to implement Mondrian s dynamic equilibrium. Once the De Stijl members discovered and understood Frank Lloyd Wright (see page 9\4), whose works were published and available in Europe in 1911, they were able to apply architectural solutions to the theoretical ideas of Neo-Plasticism. They recognized that Wright had destroyed the box, and declared the new architecture will be anticubic. Combining the color and floating planes of Mondrian and the fluid spaces of Wright, Rietveld produced the definitive De Stijl building in 1924, the Schröder House in Utrecht (fig. 28.29), which was built onto the end of existing row houses. On the fa^ade, we can find Mondrian s floating rectangles and lines. Even the Wright-like cantilevered roof appears to float. The interior (see fig. 28.28) is designed according to the same principles, with wall-to-ceiling sliding panels allowing for a restructuring of the space. Both inside and out, the Schröder House is a three-dimensional Mondrian painting ethereal, buoyant, and harmonious, embodying dynamic equilibrium. The Bauhaus: Creating the New Man 28.29 Gerrit Rietveld. Schröder House, Utrecht, Holland. 1924 As we have seen, most Dadaists, Surrealists, and abstract artists were socialists or Communists who believed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia would save the world from bourgeois materialism and decadence and would establish a worldwide utopian society. Left-wing artists flocked to Berlin in 1922 to see the first CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1007 Russian Art Exhibition, which presented the Constructivists for the first time in the West. Twice more that year, the avant-garde held conferences in Germany, attempting to commit to a social program that would put art at the service of restructuring society. All of these attempts came to naught. Instead, it was the Bauhaus, an art and design school, that gradually emerged as the strongest center for advocating social progress through art. The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 by the great Modernist architect Walter Gropius (see page 978). In many respects, the Bauhaus School was the embodiment of Muthesius s German Werkbund (see page 977), since the goal of the workshops was to design modern high-quality productionline products. Its guiding principle, however, was more utopian and less commercial, for the Bauhaus (meaning House of Building) was dedicated to the creation of utilitarian design for the new man through the marriage of art and technology. The school was formed by the merger of two Weimar arts and crafts schools, and designed to combine the fine and applied arts, giving each equal weight, as had the earlier Secessionist movements (see page 922). The artists were called artisan/craftspeople, and their mission was to create an abstract environment of the most progressive modernity. Their design ethic was based on the living environment of machines and vehicles. Only primary forms and colors could be used, all in the service of creating standard types for all practical commodities of everyday use as a social necessity. Like De Stijl, this was a philosophy oriented toward environments, not just painting and sculpture, and the Bauhaus is Walter Gropius. Two houses for the Werkbund housing development Weissenhof Settlement, Stuttgart, with furniture by Marcel Breuer. 1927 ac.3d 1008 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D often more associated with the work that came out of the textile, metal, and ceramic workshops, such as Marcel Breuer s 1927 aluminum tubular chairs and Anni Albers s abstract textiles, than with the paintings of Klee, Kandinsky, and Josef Albers, who also taught at the school. We can see the Bauhaus machine aesthetic at work in the living room of a Gropius house built in 1927 for a Werkbund housing development in Stuttgart (fig. 28.30). The furniture and lighting were designed by Marcel Breuer (1902 1981), a former Bauhaus student who became a faculty member in 1925, heading the furniture workshop. All of Breuer s objects are geometric, made of modern materials, and easily mass-produced. On the far right is perhaps his most famous product, the Wassily armchair, made of polished, nickel-plated tubular steel and cotton fabric. In its planarity, Breuer was clearly influenced by the Rietveld Red-Blue chair (which Van Doesburg had introduced to the Bauhaus in 1921 when he taught there and Breuer was a student). But now heavy wood has been replaced by a strong but light metal tube that is geometrically structured in an airy, open pattern. The feeling that results echoes the transparency and weightlessness of Suprematist painting and Constructivist sculpture, qualities that can even be seen in Tatlin s Project for Monument to the Third International (see fig. 28.24). Breuer described a practical side to his design when in the product catalogue he wrote that the chair provides a light, fully self-sprung sitting opportunity, which has the comfort of the upholstered MARCEL BREUER armchair, but with the difference that it is much lighter, handier, more hygienic. One of the strongest advocates of Constructivism at the Bauhaus, and perhaps the most influential figure there, was the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy (1895 194i). Gropius hired Moholy-Nagy in 1923 as head of the metal workshop, but gradually he became the school s primary theoretician, concerned particularly with light and movement. As early as 1922, he began designing Constructivist sculptures that generated light, as seen in jigltmSpace nodulator (fig. 28.31). This machinelike construction of planes of plastic, steel, and wood was propelled in a circle by a motor and projected an ever-changing light spectacle onto its surroundings. ot was used as a prop in a 1930 ballet at the Bauhaus, but Moholy-Nagy also viewed it as a tool to study light and space, hoping to uncover new applications for environmental or stage lighting. LÁSeLÓ MOHOLfgNAhf Many art historians consider the crowning aesthetic achievement of the Bauhaus to be the building itself, designed by Gropius in 1925 2i when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau. The building consists of three L-shaped wings coming off a central hubp The Shop Block, a workshop wing, is shown in figure 28.32r a second wing had classroomsr and a third wing held an auditoriumstheater, dining hall, and dormitory with studios. From the air, the complex looked like a Constructivist sculpture of rectangular blocks. The Bauhaus is dominated by a clearly articulated geometry. The workshop wing looks like an empty glass box, the glass curtain wall on two sides continuing around corners and flush with the stuccoed parapet above and WALTER hROPIUS 28.31 Luszló Moholy-Nagy, vigytzSpace {odulator. 1922 30. |xhibition replica, 200t, constructed courtesy of Hattula Maholy-Nagy. Steel, plastic, wood, and other materials with electric motor, 591*2 + 271*2 + 271*2" (151.1 + t9.9 + t9.9 cm). Harvard Art Museum, Busch-}eisinger Museum, Hildegard von Gontard Bequest Fund, 2007.105 28.32 Walter Gropius. Shop Block, Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany. 1925 2t CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1009 socle, or projecting molding underlying the wall, below. Instead of mass, we feel a weightless volume as defined by the metal and glass wall. And because the building projects over a setback halfbasement, it seems to float. Perhaps more than anything designed by ~e Stijl, Gropius s Bauhaus came to epitomize High Modernist architecture the architecture that evolved out of Early Modernism (see pages 976 80) in the period between the two wars. With High Modernism, buildings became more severely geometric and so light they seemed to float. Their unadorned geometric shapes represented volume, not mass. Their walls, regardless of material, were thin membranes of a taut veneer that encased the building, and, as with the Bauhaus workshop, often this veneer was a curtain of glass, although horizontal strips of windows were generally favored by High Modernist architects. But High Modernism was more than just a style it was a social movement predicated on a utopian socialist philosophy and a rationalist belief in progress. ife could be improved, the theory went, by creating a Machine Age environment. ltimately, the movement was reduced to a style in 1932 when Philip Johnson and historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock organized an exhibition entitled The International Style at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in New York. Their concern was with the look of the architecture, not its social premises. The exhibition brought the style to the attention of Americans, and resulted in the label International Style, coined by ~e Stijl, being used to describe High Modernist architecture. In 1930, architect udwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 1969) became the last director of the Bauhaus, which closed in 1933. In the 1920s, Mies had been at the center of the Berlin avant-garde. A student of Peter Behrens, he became a leading Modernist, and in 1927 organized the experimental Weissenhof Estate exhibition in Stuttgart, where leading architects were invited to build inexpensive but quality housing LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE .33 1010 for workers. At this point he was converted to High Modernism, or the International Style, and was heavily influenced by the floating planes of ~e Stijl and the complex spaces of Wright. His motto, however, was ess is more, and his architecture is characterized by a severe geometry and simplicity. Nonetheless, his buildings never seem austere they invariably have elegant proportions and a sense of refinement that makes them seem rich and lush. When budget allowed, he augmented this refinement by using luxurious materials, such as expensive marble and travertine, bronze, chrome, and tinted glass. We can see these qualities in his German Pavilion (fig. 28.33), designed for the 1929 Barcelona Exposition and dismantled after the fair closed. (A reconstruction exists in the same site today.) The pavilion itself was the German exhibit, and the building simply consists of spaces with no specific uses attached to them. There is nothing overtly innovative here the overlapping horizontal and vertical planes, the interlocking open-form space, and canterlevering had been used previously in the work of Wright and the ~ Stijl architects. Mies s innovation is subtle, and it resides in its simplicity of style. Geometry is everywhere. The pavilion sits on an enormous rectangular platform of beautiful travertine, and is partially enclosed by rectangular walls of travertine or Tinian marble. At either end, the platform is not covered and there is an asymmetrically placed but perfectly balanced rectangular pool lined with lush-looking black glass. The cantilevered flat roof is supported by a grid of eight slender piers, each a chrome x, between which are five partition walls, two in onyx, and the three others made of different kinds of glass clear, frosted, and green and encased in chrome mullions (fig. 28.34). ing a minimal vocabulary, Mies created a sumptuous, elegant feast for the eye. Even the cantilevered chair he designed for the pavilion, known as the Barcelona chair and seen in figure 28.34, is simultaneously simple and posh, and, in contrast to the Rietveld Red-Blue chair, exceptionally comfortable. udwig Mies van der Rohe. German Pavilion, 1929. Guggenheim International Exposition, Barcelona PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 28.34 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Interior of the German Pavilion, with Barcelona Chairs, 1929. Guggenheim International Exposition, Barcelona The Machine Aesthetic in Paris The machine aesthetic and the utopian dream that accompanied it also made their way to Paris, where they found a rather different voice in the architecture of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, called Le Corbusier (1886 1965). While developing his radical architectural theories, Le Corbusier also practiced as a painter, working under his given name Jeanneret. He created a style of painting that he called Purism, which reflected his belief in the supremacy of a machine aesthetic that embodied a Classical spirit. Purism influenced the French Cubist Fernand Léger, who was already well disposed toward glorifying the efficiency and purity of modern technology. Unlike Moscow, Amsterdam, and Dessau, Paris had no art schools or major artistic movements pushing for a utopian vision. Instead, the cause there was undertaken by individuals. Le Corbusier was Swiss, and led a rather peripatetic life prior to settling in Paris in the 1910s. In 1907, in Lyon, France, he met architect Tony Garnier, who had developed an ideal industrial city, the Cité Industrielle, which influenced Le Corbusier to think in terms of socialist utopian architecture and the creation of an easily reproducible architectural type that would provide superior housing for everyone. The following year in Paris, he worked part time for Auguste Perret, the architect responsible for popularizing ferroconcrete steel-reinforced concrete as an architectural material. Most important, however, he demonstrated, as Max Berg had in his Breslau Jahrhunderthalle in 1912 13 (see fig. 27.39), the practicality of ferroconcrete: It is inexpensive, adaptable, easy to use, and very strong, combining the tensile strength of steel with the compressive resistance of concrete. (See Materials and Techniques, page 1013.) It is the medium Le Corbusier would adopt for most of his buildings. The last major influence on Le Corbusier was his experience in 1910 working in Peter Behrens s office in Berlin, where his colleagues included Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Here, he worked first hand with the German avant-garde architects who would be responsible for developing the International Style, and even then he was talking about creating a machine-based, easily reproduced architecture. In 1922, Le Corbusier opened an architectural firm with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and over the course of the next two decades, he designed a series of houses that allowed him to develop and implement his theories of the ideal house, one that could serve as a prototype for all homes. (See Primary Source, page 1012.) He called his first type, developed in 1914, the DomIno, because the house consisted of concrete floors with ceilings that sat on concrete columns arranged in a grid pattern that resembled the dots on a domino. By 1923, he had developed the CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1011 PRIMARY SOURCE Le Corbusier (1886 1965) r Towards a New Architecture (193) First published in 1923, Towards a New Architecture codified ideas that were being widely discussed among architects, and it became the first manifesto of the International Style. The following excerpts are from the opening argument. T he Architect, by his arrangement of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit; by forms and shapes he affects our senses to an acute degree and provokes plastic emotions; by the relationships which he creates he wakes profound echoes in us, he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world, he determines the various movements of our heart and of our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty. principles for his ideal home, which he published in an article entitled Five Points of a New Architecture. His five points were the following: (1) no ground floor, with the house raised on columns called plts; (2) a flat roof, which would be used as a garden terrace; (3) an open floor plan, with partitions slotted between supports; (4) free composition of the exterior curtain walls; and (5) preferably ribbon (horizontal) windows. The raised house allowed for privacy and light and made the outdoors accessible by putting a garden on the roof. Much later, Le Corbusier remarked that a house is a machine for living in, which suggested wrongly to many critics that he advocated a brutal functionalism that was not concerned with beauty and comfort. In fact, Le Corbusier wanted to create a Classical purity based on 28.35 Le Corbusier. Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, France. 1928 29 1012 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D Primary forms are beautiful forms because they can be clearly appreciated. The great problems of modern construction must have a geometrical solution. The house is a machine for living in. Standards are a matter of logic, analysis, and minute study. Man looks at the creation of architecture with his eyes, which are 5 feet 6 inches from the ground. Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its destined ends, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by the new spirit. The problem of the house is a problem of the epoch. If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the house, and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we shall arrive at the House-Machine, the massproduction house, healthy (and morally so, too) and beautiful. Source: Le Corbusier, oar s a ¡e Arc¢itecture (New York: Dover, 1986) geometry and a machine-age look. Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light, he wrote. Cubes, cones, cylinders, and pyramids are the primary forms which light reveals to advantage. Within this aesthetic, however, his emphasis was on the human being and living. Machine Age values and technology were meant to serve humans, and consequently his houses, using the latest technology, would have a Machine Age look and efficiency. And they would be filled with light. The 1928 29 Villa Savoye (fig. 3) in Poissy-sur-Seine, outside Paris, is Le Corbusier s best-known house, and here we can see most of the elements called for in his Five Points : the pilotis, the raised living space, the ribbon windows, and the flat-roof £¤¥¦§¨©£ª ©§¥©¨£«£ ¬£©®£ §¥£ §¦ «¯£ ®§°« ±§±²³¨ ¬²¤³ª¤¥´ ®«£¨µ R ¶·¸¹ ¶º »¼½ »¾½º»¶½»¼ ¿½º»ÀÂÃ. ÄÅº¿Â½»½ ¶¹ · ¿½Æ½º» Æ¶Ç»ÀÂ½ ÅÈ ¹·ºÉ, ¸¶Æ½¹»Åº½, ·ºÉ ¾·»½Â »¼·» ¿Åº»·¶º¹ ¹Æ·¸¸ ¹»Åº½¹ ÅÂ Å»¼½Â (generally solid) small objects. While its history dates to 5600 BCE in the Balkans, the Romans were the first to use it extensively, starting in the second century BCE (see pages 186 87). Romans builders used concrete for bridges, docks, pavements, and aqueducts, but it was also used for homes and major civic buildings, such as the Pantheon (see fig. 7.23). Concrete virtually disappeared from architecture after the Fall of Rome. Its revival began in 1824, when an English mason, Joseph Aspdin, patented an improved cement. Because it resembled a natural François Hennebique. System for reinforced concrete. 1892 (After Curtis) stone found on the Isle of Portland, the new material was called Portland cement. To make it, Aspdin heated clay and limestone to engineer François Hennebique designed a ferroconcrete post-and-slab especially high temperatures, a process still used today. While con- construction where each floor/ceiling was an integral part of the struc- crete is fire-resistant and can stand extremely high compression, or ture, not a separate element lying on top of a supporting frame (see MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES Reinforced Concrete fig.). Hennebrique s engineering was applied largely to industrial buildings and simply imitated traditional post-andlintel styles. Credit for introducing ferroconcrete to high architecture generally goes to the French architect Auguste Perret, who designed apartment buildings and parking garages using steel-reinforced concrete in the opening decades of the twentieth century. One of his most famous buildings is the Raincy Church, outside Paris, built in 1922 (see fig.), which conceptually uses the Rationalism we saw in Soufflot s Saint-Geneviève (see fig. 23.19) while aspiring to implement the lightness and airiness of a Gothic cathedral. Max Berg s Jahrhunderthalle (see fig. 27.39) in Breslau, built in Auguste Perret. Notre Dame, Le Raincy, France. 1923 24 1912 13, also played a major role in popularizing ferroconcrete. Ultimately, it evenly applied weight, it does not have much tensile strength. That is, became the principal medium for Le Corbusier and a favorite for Frank it does not hold up under unevenly applied stresses. To solve the prob- Lloyd Wright (see page 934). lem, engineers reinforced the concrete by embedding iron rods within In addition to its strength, ferroconcrete is attractive because it is it. Steel rods replaced iron rods in the late nineteenth century. (A form inexpensive. The concrete component is readily available. The steel, of steel first appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, the most expensive and rare component, makes up only 1 to 6 percent although modern steel was not invented until toward the end of the of the structure. By 1904, ferroconcrete was being used in skyscrap- century.) Iron and concrete were a perfect match, since the materials ers; the first use was in the Ingalls Building in Cincinnati, which was 16 complemented each other. Concrete protected the iron, which other- stories and rose to 210 feet. By 1962, it was being used in modern wise melted and corroded easily, while iron provided the tensile high-rises, including the 60-story twin towers of Marina City in strength that concrete lacked. Chicago. From 1998 to 2003, the largest building in the world was the Almost simultaneously in England and France, inventors began to ferroconcrete Petronas Towers in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, designed patent ferroconcrete, as steel-reinforced concrete is called. A British by Cesar Pelli, who is based in Hartford, Connecticut. Rising 88 plasterer patented concrete floors and roofs made with iron bars stories and 1,483 feet, the building would have been prohibitively and wire rope, while a French gardener took out a patent on steel- expensive without ferroconcrete, since Malaysia does not manufacture reinforced concrete planters, eventually designing guardrails, posts, steel. Like much of the world, however, Malaysia readily produces and beams as well. But it was not until the 1890s that the French high-quality concrete. CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1013 ÝÞ.3ß Le Corbusier. Interior of the Villa Savoye, àoissy-sur-Seine, ârance. 1928 29 terrace, which is protected behind the enormous cylindrical windscreens that look like oceanliner smokestacks. The main floor, the second, has an open-space plan using partition walls, and it faces into a court (fig. 28.36), from which a ramp leads up to the roof. Everywhere we look we see a beautiful classicizing geometry, the building blocks of Le Corbusier s design aesthetic. The building is a perfect square box precisely defined by its taut skin of concrete. The pilotis are cylinders, and the windbreakers are enormous arcs. Obscured by the shadow in figure 28.Ê5 is another geometric curve on the ground floor, which encloses the garage and servants quarters. Like the Bauhaus and the SchrËder House, the villa appears light, virtually floating on its pilotis. But as abstract and futuristic as the house may seem, it resonates with the past. We can project onto it the classic, white stuccoed Mediterranean house, oriented around a central court, that sits on a hill overlooking the sea. Le Corbusier also described his villa as a ÌarÍin ÎÏÎÐenÍÏ, a hanging garden reflecting the mythical gardens of Babylon. The building also recalls Ñalladio in the perfection of the square, while the colonnade of pilotis echoes a Doric temple. The ramps (there is a circular staircase as well) linking the floors have reminded scholars of the great entrance ramps of Mycenae. In one of the great statements of High Modernism, Le Corbusier presents the Modernist, Machine Age update of the great Greek temple perched on a hill, overlooking nature, and permeated with light and air. A N D F E R N A N D L É G E R In 1917, Le Corbusier met the painter Amédée Ozenfant (188Ò 19ÒÒ), and together they developed a theory called Ñurism, which in essence was a PURISM 1014 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D Ôeo-Ñlatonic concept that reduced all artistic expression to an abstract Classical purity reflecting a machine aesthetic. Clean line, pure forms, and mathematical clarity were highly valued. In 1918, they published an essay entitled After Cubism that railed against the distortions of the Cubist style, and in 1920 they published another essay, Ñurism, which gave a label to their theory. As stated before, Le Corbusier was a painter as well. Working and writing under his given name Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, and like his colleague, Ozenfant, he made mostly still lifes, which used the multiple perspectives of Cubism but reduced objects to geometric mechanomorphic forms that run parallel to the picture plane. The Cubist Õernand Léger (1881 1955) became an adherent of Ñurism, although he never defined himself as such. He was certainly predisposed to its ideas, for in the early 1910s, he had made abstract, mechanical-looking Cubist figures, and was an outspoken socialist and champion of modernity and technological advancement. In the early 1920s, however, his style reflected the machinelike geometry and Classicism advocated by Jeanneret and Ozenfant, as can be seen in Ö×ree ØoÙÚn (Le ÛranÍ ÜéÌeÏner) (fig. 28.37) of 1921. His almost identical-looking nudes are constructed of circles and cylinders. Their body parts, such as hair and faces, are so similar they could be interchangeable. Virtually all of the objects look machine-made, and, as with the figures, they are reduced to cubes, cones, cylinders, and pyramids. Organic and man-made elements are virtually indistinguishable, and both types are ordered in a tight grid of horizontal and verticals and run parallel to the picture plane. Color is also kept to essentials the primary and binaries the building blocks of the 28.37 Fernand êëger, Three Women (Le Grand Déjeuner). 1921. ìil on canvas, 6í1*4" + 8í3" (1.8 + 2.5 m). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund. 189.1942 color spectrum. ãéger has taken the Classical theme of the monumental nude (although here we seem to be in a brothel) and updated it by placing it in a contemporary world of technological harmony and perfection, in effect telling us, as Seurat had 30 years earlier (see page 908), that the new Classicism and world order are based on the machine and science. Twentieth Amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920, but it had no impact on granting social and economic parity, as women continued to be restricted to women s jobs and less pay. The Great æepression exacerbated these injustices, resulting in the rise in the 1930s of a representational art called Social Realism. The City and Industry ART IN AMERICA: MODERNITY, SPIRITUALITY, AND REGIONALISM Perhaps more than Europe, the äåited States could embrace the machine as the emblem of progress, for after World War I, America was the undisputed technological world leader. In contrast to the European avant-garde that sought a classless, nationless world, Americans were preoccupied with national identity. And generally they did not have a utopian vision. Instead they viewed skyscrapers, factories, and machines as symbols of the nation s technological superiority. But not everyone embraced modernity. As the economy boomed in the postwar years, culminating in the dizzying exuberance of the Roaring Twenties, many artists rejected materialism and looked to the spiritual. While some artists turned to nature in search of universal truths, others sought strength in old-fashioned American values that could be found in the American heartland, especially in the mythic conservative lifestyle of its hearty, hard-working, Godfearing farmers. Still others responded to the poverty and social discontent that coexisted with the boom years. The period was marked by the oppression of labor, violent labor strikes, and anarchist threats. Racism escalated in the South, led by the dramatic growth of the Ku Klux Klan and increased lynchings of black men. The Arriving in New York harbor for the first time in 1915, Marcel marveled at the towering skyscrapers and pronounced them the epitome of modernity. He saw in America the future of art. The skyscraper and modern industry did indeed become the emblems of America, replacing landscape, which had dominated painting in the previous century. Skyscrapers were symbols of modernity, industry, and commerce, and thus of the country s technological and financial superiority, for the äåited States entered the century as the wealthiest and most modern country in the world. World War I fueled the economy, ushering in an era of unprecedented consumerism and materialism. Known as the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age, the 1920s were dominated by the culture of the city, for by 1920 more people lived in cities than in the countryside. The symbol of the nation was New York, dominated by skyscrapers. Beginning in the late 1910s, these cathedrals of capitalism or of commerce became the favorite subject for painters and photographers and for sculptors and designers who presented the icon in all its technological splendor. Skyscrapers were shown soaring toward the heavens without a hint of the streets or humanity below. Bridges, factories, dams, refineries anything that demonstrated America s advanced modernity were also transformed into monuments as grand as the pyramids of Egypt and as sacred as the Gothic cathedrals of France. æuchamp CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 101è Perhaps the greatest single visual icon of the city was made by the Italian immigrant Joseph Stella (1877 1946). întitled The ïoðñe oò the óðty (ôeõ ÷orø Interùretedú (fig. 28û38) and completed in 1922, it is an 8-foot-high, five-panel work that features on its center panel an abstraction of the city s towers, with the famous Flatiron building in the foreground, surrounded by both actual and fictitious buildings. The panels flanking the center panel represent the üreat White Way, ýroadway, which has been reduced to an abstraction of color and light. The far-left panel presents the harbor on the Hudson River on the west side of lower Manhattan, while the right panel shows the þÿooklyn þÿidge on the east side. îvery image features the technological wonders of Manhattan. We see communication towers, air-venting systems, and elevated trains in the harbor picture. The üGeat White Way panels present the dazzling illumination of Times Square at night, which at the time had no equivalent anywhere else in the world. In effect, these two panels are a homage to electricity and the energy of the city. And even 35 years after opening, the ýrooklyn ýridge still remained one of the world s great feats of engineering. Stella came to America in 1896, thus witnessing the rise of modern New York City at the turn of the century. He temporarily returned to Italy to study in 1910, where he met the Futurists (see pages 964 66). Through the Stieglitz gallery and his friendship with Duchamp and Man Ray, among others, he kept in touch JOSEPH STELLA 28.38 Joseph Stella, The Voice of the City (New York Interpreted). 1920 22. Oil and tempera on canvas, five panels, 8'33*4" + 22'6" (2.53 + 6.86 m). The Newark Museum, Newark. 37.288 a e 1016 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D with îuropean trends, with Cubism becoming his primary artistic language in the 1910s. The üGeat White Way panels especially reflect the tenets of Futurism, for here we see the sound waves and Mach-like indications of motion that we saw in ýoccioni s States oò Mðnd I (see fig. 27.20). Their dizzying kaleidoscope of color powerfully captures the intense visual experience of Times Square at night. ýut in the skyscraper and ýrooklyn ýridge panels, Stella is not only representational, he is iconic, centering his motifs and transforming them into emblems of modernity. His palette is deeply saturated, and color is often encased in heavy black-line drawing, in effect transforming his image into a medieval stained-glass window. He reinforces the religious motif by adding a predella at the bottom (see page 525), which itemizes the different tunnels and utility tubes running beneath the city. In effect, Stella is declaring technology and modernity the religion of the twentieth century. Photography, it turns out, was especially well suited for capturing the triumphs of the Machine Age. However, the first photographs of modern New York, such as Alfred Stieglitz s The óðty oò Ambðtðon (see fig. 26.45), romanticized the metropolis by immersing it in a soft pictorial haze. A breakthrough occurred when a young New Yorker, Paul Strand (1890 1976), from 1915 to 1917 made a large body of work of PAUL STRAND ire heel.l 1917. Platinum print from enlarged 28.39 Paul Strand, negative, 13 + 101*4" (33.1 + 26.1 cm). George Eastman House sharply focused, high-contrast photographs. Stieglitz immediately recognized their importance and showed a selection of them at 291. Wire Wheel (fig. 28.39) is from this period. Its abstracted subject is a Model T Ford, an icon of the Machine Age since it marked the advent of the assembly line. The picture rejects the painterliness of turn-of-the-century pictorial photography. In its place is a new compositional style based on the Cubism that Strand saw displayed at Stieglitz s 291. By taking a close-up of the car, Strand created a skewed perspective and tight cropping, resulting in a difficult-to-read image with a flattened and complicated space. In 1920, Strand collaborated with painter/photographer Charles Sheeler (1883 1965) to make a film intended to capture the energy and grandeur of New York. Entitled Manhatta (New www.myartslab.com), myartslab.com), my ) it opens with Yor the Magnificent (see www.my commuters arriving by ferry in lower Manhattan, spilling off the boat in teeming masses, and swarming through the financial district on their way to work. At the end of the film, the crowds get back on the boat at sunset. Rapid editing, vertiginous shots CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1017 taken from the top of skyscrapers (fig. 28.40), raking angles, and sharp value contrasts all simulating a Cubist fracturing are among the formalist devices that give this movie a sense of surging energy and constant movement designed to capture the rapid pace of modernity and the powerful current of the urban experience. Interspersed throughout the film are fragments of Walt Whitman s 1860/1881 poem Mannahatta which proclaims the greatness, energy, and might of ew ork. MARARET 28.40 Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. Still from the film Manhatta e or the Magnificent. 1920. Black-and-white film, no sound, 10 minutes. Frame enlargement from 2008 2k digital restoration by Lowry Digital BO U R K E - H I T E Strand s hard-edged aesthetic transformed photography, not only in America, but eventually throughout the world. His style was especially appropriate for technological and industrial images, reinforcing the machinemade precision of the subject. Photojournalist Margaret BourkeWhite especially embraced this new aesthetic and was drawn to technological imagery, especially machines, airplanes, and dirigibles. In Fort Pec Dam, Montana (fig. 28.41), she presents a symbol of American technology. The picture was the cover image for the very first issue of Life, published on ovember 23, 1936. The photograph s power lies in its severe austerity, which reinforces the mammoth scale of the dam, dwarfing the antlike workers below. Each of the dam s pylons is identical, looking as though they were pressed out of an enormous machine mold, and because the photograph of the dam is cropped on either side, these gigantic assembly-line towers seem endless as well. wing to their severe monumentality, they take on the grandeur of ancient Assyrian or Egyptian monuments. Again we find an artist declaring modern technology to be the new Classicism. In his 1927 painting My Egy t (fig. 28.42), depicting contemporary grain elevators near his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Charles Demuth (1883 1935) similarly transformed American modernity into a Classical icon. Demuth had studied in Paris from 1912 to 1914, absorbing European Modernism, and by the 1920s he was traveling in the most sophisticated artistic circles and showing with Alfred Stieglitz. His work is quite varied in style, even in a given period, and here we see him working in the American counterpart of Purism, a style called Precisionism. In the 1920s, a group of American artists, including Demuth, developed a look that had the hard-edged geometric quality of Cubism but was far more representational. It came to be called Precisionism not only because of its precise geometry and drawing, but also because it seemed to capture the precision of mechanization and industry, which was often its subject matter. Brushwork was meticulous, and at one point these artists, who rarely showed together and did not think of themselves as a group, were called Immaculates. At first glance, My Egy t seems quite Cubist. But the physical integrity of the grain elevators is barely compromised, and what seems like Cubist fracturing are mysterious, almost mystical, beams of light that only slightly distort the objects but quite successfully invest the building with a brute power, if not a mystical transcendence. The title suggests that such agricultural architecture as grain elevators were America s pyramids. The smokestack CHARLES DEMUTH 28.41 Margaret Bourke-White ort Pec Dam Montana. 1936. Time-Life, Inc. 1018 P A RT I THE M D ER N RLD +8.42 Charles 0emuth, 3y 4gy5t. 1927. 6il and graphite on composition board, 27113*4" + 276" (91 + 76 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with Funds from Gertrude 8anderbilt Whitney. 31.172 endows the grain elevators with an industrial might, and the geometry of the ventilation ducts and massive cylinders of the storage tanks virtually transform the building itself into an efficient machine. Among the American artists who captured the essence of the modern experience using abstraction was Stuart Dvis (1892 1964). The 1913 Armory Show in New York (see page 974) converted Dvis into a dedicated Modernist, and by the 1920s his work was becoming increasingly abstract. Just as Mondrian tried to find an abstract equivalent for invisible life forces, Davis wanted to create the plastic equivalent for experiencing modern life flying in an airplane, looking down from a towering skyscraper, listening to jazz music, or riding in a speeding car, motorcycle, or train. He wanted to capture the experience STUART DAVIS of the new lights, speeds, and spaces which are uniquely real in our time. To do this, he used a Synthetic Cubist vocabulary, and by the 1930s his palette had become bright, limited to primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, and his forms quite jaunty and their juxtaposition raucous, as seen in Hot tll-ae or x olors eventh venue tyle (fig. 2843) of 1940. After describing how his colors were used like musical instruments to create a composition (Davis loved jazz and swing), he went on to describe his picture, painted in his Seventh Avenue studio: The subject matter is well within the experience of any modern city dweller. Fruit and flowers; kitchen utensils; fall skies; horizons; taxi cabs; radio; art exhibitions and reproductions; fast travel; Americana; movies; electric signs; dynamics of city sights and sounds; these and a thousand more are common experience and they are the basic subject matter which my picture celebrates. Embedded !"T#R 2 8 !RT $#T%##& T # %!R* 1019 28.4@ Stuart Iavis, Hot StillJ SQape for SiX Colors SeZenth [Zenue Style. 1940. \il on canvas, 36 * 45" (91.4 * 113.9 cm). Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of the William H. ]ane Foundation and the M. and M. Karolik Collection, by Exchange, 1983.120 within this playful jumble of color and shapes and overlapping planes are smokestacks, seascapes, and brick walls, all reduced to funky hieroglyphic notations, which in their cartoony character seem to tap into American popular culture. In an almost indefinable way, <avis s sensitivity captures the pulse of America its gaudy advertising, its love of the new, its jazz, its mobility, its intensity and speed, even its rootlessness. Art Deco and the International Style While the skyscraper became the national emblem of America s modernity, the buildings themselves were aesthetically conservative compared with European architectural developments, especially the International Style. Their distinguishing characteristic was their height. By 1900, New York had become the home of the skyscraper, taking the lead from Chicago. Buildings became progressively taller, with Cass Gilbert s 792-foot Woolworth Building dominating the cityscape in 1913. Aesthetically the new towers were very nineteenth-century, reflecting a variety of historical styles, often the Gothic. The wealth of the Roaring Twenties produced furious building campaigns, as architects competed to design the world s tallest building. Almost simultaneously, the 77story Chrysler Building and 102-story Empire State Building went up in 1930. The Chrysler Building (fig. 28.44) designed by little-known architect William van Alen (1883 1954), is often considered the finest Art <eco skyscraper. Art <=co is a decorative-arts style 10?0 PA R ^ I V ^HE M O D ER N _ORLD that emerged in 1925 at the Exhibition of <ecorative and Industrial Art held in Paris. Like the Bauhaus school, Art <=co concepts aimed to close the gap between quality design and mass production. It was an outgrowth of Art Nouveau, but it replaced the organic forms with a Machine Age geometric and streamlined look. Unlike the Bauhaus, Art <=co had no utopian goal> it was largely bourgeois, indulging in fantasy and lavishness. It was about decorative veneer, not idealistic substance. Within the geometry and streamlining of the machine aesthetic, it absorbed a wide range of historical references, from Cubist fracturing to the zigzag patterning of Native American and Pre-Columbian design. <=co designers loved lush colors, opulent materials, and shiny surfaces. Inspired by the geometry of machines, it generally drew together a variety of angular forms, often in jagged, staccato rhythms, and set them off against organic motifs that recall Art Nouveau or Jugendstil. We can see these qualities in the Chrysler Building. The geometry is streamlined in the tapering tower with its steadily receding arches. The flamelike triangular windows create a staccato rhythm, and the entire crown is sheathed in glistening stainless steel. Gargoyles duplicating the hood ornament for the 1929 Chrysler decorate the corners. The International Style came to America about this same time, appearing in Raymond M. Hood s 1931 McGraw-Hill Building in New York and in the 1929 32 Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building (fig. 28.45) by George Howe (1886 1955) and William E. Lescaze (1896 1969). That Howe and Lescaze got to design a modern building is itself quite remarkable, since there was nothing else like it in America when it was planned. The building already presented an enormous financial risk, as potential renters were becoming scarce as the Great Depression deepened. Their building has many of the characteristics of High Modernism, but its floating, cantilevered blocks with glass curtain walls were compromised when the client insisted the piers get pushed to the outer perimeter of the building, creating strong vertical accents and interfering with the horizontal windows and the thin tautness of the wall. As a result, the building seems more massive than its light, floating European counterparts (see fig. 28.32). But the Philadelphia 28.45 George Howe and William E. Lescaze. Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, Philadelphia. 1929 32 Savings Fund Society Building reflects its functionalism well, as each of the Constructivist-like blocks that we can see on the exterior was designed to accommodate a different purpose. See`ing the Sairitual dn the 1910s, much of the American creative community turned 28.44 William van Alen. Chrysler Building, New ork. 1928 30 its attention to producing a specifically American art. Writers, musicians, artists, and poets all felt that American culture was derived from Europee now, they would seek to discover what was unique about the American experience and try to express it in an indigenous way. For some artists, like Stella in jme noioe or tme sity tze{ |or} Inter~rete and Demuth in My Egypt, the answer lay in American modernity. Others looked to nature, going back to the pantheistic Romanticism of the Hudson River School and its successors. Stieglitz especially became preoccupied with this issue of an American art, deciding in the 1920s to represent only American artists and naming his last gallery, which he opened in 1928, An American Place. Stieglitz himself became increasingly intolerant of modernity, initially resisting buying a radio or a car, CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEE THE WARS 1021 and like so many others at the time shunning materialism to seek a spirituality in modern America. Stieglitz, who had published sections of Kandinsky s Concerning the Spiritual in rt (see page 959) in Camera ork, himself became preoccupied with visually capturing an equivalent of his emotions when confronting sublime nature. The artists that Stieglitz showed from the early 1920s until his death in 1946 were generally, but not always, preoccupied with finding a higher meaning in life within a materialistic modern world, often focusing on nature. One was Georgia O Keeffe, with whom Stieglitz became romantically involved in 1918 and later married. (Item not available in eText) When Stieglitz first showed her work in 1916, Georgia O Keeffe (1887 1986) was making small abstract minimalist watercolors that evoked sublime landscapes. Toward 1920, her presentation of nature evolved into close-ups of flowers, as seen in Black Iris III (fig. 28.46) of 1926, where the image is so magnified it virtually becomes abstract. We do not have to look far to find the pictorial source for O Keeffe: Paul Strand. O Keeffe briefly fell in love with the young, handsome Strand in GEORGIA O KEEFFE 28.47 Edward Weston, Pepper. 1930. Gelatin silver print. Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona 28.46 Georgia O Keeffe, Black Iris III. 1926. Oil on canvas, 36 + 297*8" (91.4 + 75.9 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949 1022 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 1917 and was smitten as well by the power of his photography, especially the use of the close-up image. This compositional device, she wrote, forced a viewer to see flowers with the same intensity that she did. But by abstracting the close-up, O Keeffe accomplished much more: The forms of the flowers morph into the parts of a woman s body, and the iris is redolent of female sexuality. The petals ethereally dissolve into their surroundings, seeming to become one with the rest of nature. Partly because of Stieglitz s marketing, critics described O Keeffe s flowers as overtly erotic and sexual, which the new loose morality of the Roaring Twenties could accommodate. This interpretation outraged O Keeffe, who denied that her pictures were about sexuality per se. And they are not. As with the banned sexually explicit novels of her friend the English author D. H. Lawrence, her paintings were not about lust but the uncontainable surging force of nature, which includes the urge to procreate. Sexuality was portrayed as being natural, beautiful, and as essential as a flower blossoming, disseminating pollen, and reproducing. And if her wonderful organic flower, which seems to be growing before our very eyes, begins to take on the look of other objects, such as clouds, smoke, buttocks, and flesh, it only increases the sense of universal equivalence that she believed ran through all things. In this microcosm of an iris, O Keeffe presents a macrocosm so large it encompasses the entire universe. ARD E S O N Due to both Strand and O Keeffe, the close-up became a popular device with both painters and photographers in the 1920s, and in the hands of some artists it had the same spiritual dimensions found in O Keeffe s paintings. Pepper (fig. 2.47) by the Californian Edward Weston (188 1958) falls into this category, as the rippling gnarled vegetable is transformed through lighting and cropping to resemble, in some places, a curled up figure (the back facing the upper right corner, buttocks to the lower right) and, in other places, breasts, arms, and so on. Weston was inspired to work with sharp-focus photography after a visit to New York in 1922, where he met Stieglitz and Strand. He then abandoned Pictorialist photography. Using a largeformat camera that allowed him to print from 4-by-5 inch or 8by-10-inch negatives, he was able to achieve rich detail and highly refined, beautiful textures. In 1932, he founded, with Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and others, a San Francisco photography group called f4, a reference to the very small camera aperture that allowed for tremendous depth of field, and thus sharp, crisp images. ED Regionalism and National Identity While the New York avant-garde sought a national identity and spirituality using either images of modernity or compact abstract styles, a group of idwest artists, headed by Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and ohn Stewart Curry, turned to oldfashioned representational art and regional imagery. Although trained in modern-art centers (Benton and Wood studied in Europe as well as in New York and Chicago), they generally preferred to work in the idwest, where they came from and with which they identified. The most famous image produced by this group is American Gothic (fig. 28.48) by Grant Wood (1891 1942) of Cedar apids, Iowa. The picture was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930, where it caused a stir and brought Wood to national attention. It was intended as a window into the idwest world in which the artist grew up and lived. A fictitious father and spinster daughter are presented as the God-fearing descendants of stalwart pioneers who first worked the soil. They are dressed in old-fashioned clothes (Item not available in eText) 28.48 Grant Wood, American Gothic. 1930. Oil on beaverboard, 3011*16 + 2511*16" (78 + 5.3 cm). Unframed. The Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection. 1930.934 CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 10 and stand firmly against the march of progress. The style of their house, from which the title of the painting is taken, is Carpenter Gothic, a nineteenth-century style evoking both the humble modesty and old-fashioned ways of the residents as well as their religious intensity, which parallels the fervor of the medieval period when Gothic cathedrals were built. Wood further emphasizes his characters faith by developing numerous crosses within the façade, and by putting a church steeple in the distant background. In addition to being hard-working and reverent, we also know these farmers are orderly and clean, as suggested by the crisp drawing and severe horizontal and vertical composition. This propriety also stems from the primness of the woman s conservative dress and hair and the suggestion that she carefully tends to the house, as she does to the plants on the front porch. The figures harsh frontality, the man s firm grasp on his pitchfork, and his overalls suggest that they are industrious and strong. There is no hint of modernity, and the simplicity and austerity of the setting suggests they are frugal. Nonetheless, many critics viewed Wood as ridiculing his sitters and their lifestyle, and indeed the painting does contain humor, such as the woman warily looking off to the side as if to make sure nothing untoward is occurring. But regardless of interpretation, no one seemed to deny that the picture captured something fundamentally American, and especially Midwestern. The Harlem Renaissance From 1910 to 1940, approximately 1.6 million African Americans fled the racism and poverty of the rural South for the cities of the industrial north, where they hoped to find jobs as well as justice and equality. In the North, the new migrants often discovered they had exchanged rural poverty for urban slums, and the racism encoded in Southern Jim Crow laws for prejudice, segregated neighborhoods, and second-class citizenship. Nonetheless, the confluence of blacks in New York s Harlem and Chicago s South Side resulted in a cultural flourishing devoted to self-discovery and to establishing a black identity, something white America had methodically denied African Americans. The movement was then called the New Negro Movement, although today it is generally known as the Harlem Renaissance, after its primary center, often described as its capital. Leading this movement in literature, music, theater, and art was the Howard University philosopher Alain Locke (1886 1954), who called for a distinctive style that evoked a black sensibility and perspective. He advocated recapturing the African past and its art, which white avant-garde artists had already done, although presenting it from their own narrow perspective and using it to reflect their own needs and interests. Locke encouraged representations of African Americans and their lives as well as a 28.49 Jacob Lawrence, In the North the Negro Had Better Educational Facilities, from the series The Migration of the Negro, number 58. 1940 41. Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 * 18" (30.5 * 45.7 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy 1024 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D portrayal of the distinctive physical qualities of the race, just as African masks often stressed black physiognomy. In effect, he was advocating artists and writers to declare that Black is beautiful. In his promotion of a black aesthetic, he encouraged artists to depict a distinct African-American culture, one that departed from the Euro-American tradition and reflected the enormous contributions Americans of African descent had made to American life and identity. Prior to the Harlem Renaissance, African-American fine artists made art that was inspired by the art that their EuroAmerican counterparts were producing, with the intention of fitting in, conforming, and appealing to market values, which were determined by white artists. They made the same landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes, all devoid of black content. (However, in the crafts and folk art, such as quilts, metalwork, and furniture, and in music as well, African Americans were often influenced by African traditions.) With the Harlem Renaissance, artists began making African Americans the subject of their art. Although most major African-American artists worked within the Modernist tradition, they also offered an alternative to this tradition by making racial identity a prominent theme in their work. In effect, they made the subject of race and the power of its presentation as important as formal innovation. The most famous painter to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance was Jacob Lawrence (1917 2000), who received his training as a teenager in the 1930s at the federally sponsored Harlem Art Workshop and Harlem Community Art Center. Lawrence regularly went to midtown to take in all the art the city had to offer, from a 1935 exhibition of African Art at the Museum of Modern Art, to Mexican textiles, to all of the latest European styles. In the late 1930s, he began making large narrative series dedicated to black leaders, including Harriet Tubman, Toussaint L Ouverture, and Frederick Douglass. The images were small and modest, made of poster paint on cardboard or posterboard. Lawrence is best known for his Migration Series, begun in 1940. In 60 images, Lawrence presented the reasons for blacks migrating north and their experiences in both the North and the South. While the series is anecdotal, the images did much of the talking through their abstraction, as seen in number 58, In the North the Negro Had Better Educational Facilities (fig. 28.49). Three girls write numbers on a blackboard, but we do not see their faces, which would make them individuals. Instead, we see numbers and arms rising higher, suggesting elevation through education, and we see a clean slate for a clean start. The girls brightly colored dresses affirm life and happiness, while the jagged and pointed edges in their hair and skirts impart an energy and a quality of striving. Lawrence generally shows a collective black spirit, not an individual or individual expression. He is interested in a human spirit that relentlessly and energetically moves forward, building a better future. His sparse and beautifully colored pictures embody a remarkable psychology, which is often reinforced by the Modernist space of his pictures. Here, a JACOB LAWRENCE flat field pushes the figures to the surface, prominently displaying them, and the composition s geometry seems to reinforce the discipline of the students dedication to education. MEXICAN ART: SEEKING A NATIONAL IDENTITY The Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 with the overthrow of the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz and ended in 1921 with the formation of the reformist government of Alvaro Obregón, triggered a wave of nationalism within the cultural community, one that focused on indigenous traditions while rejecting European influences. A government building campaign resulted in a large number of impressive mural commissions, which in turn gave rise to a school of artists headed by Diego Rivera, David Siquieros, and José Clemente Orozco. Either socialists or Communists, the muralists proclaimed murals as the true art of the people. The Mexican muralists gained international renown and were especially popular in the United States, where they received important commissions, ironically from major capitalists such as the Rockefeller family. Diego Rivera Diego Rivera (1886 1957) is perhaps the best known of the three major muralists. He lived in Europe, primarily in Paris, from 1907 to 1921, and was an accomplished Cubist. By the late 1910s, Rivera was consumed by the idea of creating a nationalistic revolutionary art through mural painting, and he traveled to Italy to study Renaissance murals. Upon returning to Mexico, he jettisoned his elite esoteric Cubism for the straightforward representational art of fifteenth-century Italy, giving it a monumentality that also echoed the strong simple forms of Aztec and Mayan art. Furthermore, he shunned easel painting, declaring it a bourgeois capitalistic art form, a commodity for the rich. He viewed his fresco murals as a public art, an art for the masses. He also felt his art should be about the indigenous people, not the Euro-Mexicans and their European customs. Consequently, many of his mural commissions are about national identity and the uniqueness of Mexican customs and tradition. Rivera was a Communist, and his politics, especially his championing of the common folk and labor, appear in his murals. From 1930 to 1934, he received numerous commissions in the United States, and his representational art had a tremendous impact on American mural painting, which was proliferating due to support from Franklin D. Roosevelts s New Deal administration which provided artists with work. One major project was the lobby of the RCA building in Rockefeller Center. Entitled Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to a New and Better Future, it included a portrait of the Communist leader Lenin, which outraged the Rockefellers, who had commissioned the mural. The Rockefellers paid Rivera but then destroyed the mural. Rivera remade it as Man, Controller of the CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 1025 28.0 Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe. 1934. Fresco, 1511" * 376" (4.85 * 11.45 m). Museo del Palacio de ellas Artes, Mexico City Universe (fig. 28.50) at the Museo del Palacio de ellas Artes in Mexico City in 1934. The painting champions science and Communism, which, for Rivera, were the twin tools of progress. In the center of the composition we see Man, positioned under a telescope and with a microscope to his right (our left), indicating that humankind will control the future through science. Two crisscrossing ellipses of light seem to emanate from Man, one depicting a microscopic world, the other the cosmos. elow him is the earth, and the superior agricultural products generated by scientific discovery. To Man s left (our right), we see, sandwiched between the healthy microorganisms and a harmonious cosmos, Lenin holding hands with workers of different races. eyond is a scene of healthy unified labor. To Man s right (our left) are the evils of capitalism. etween the ellipses showing diseased organisms and a clashing cosmos is a decadent bar scene depicting the well-heeled bourgeoisie, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr. eyond are frightening soldiers and discontented, protesting laborers. R I D A A H L O A more remarkable, if less influential, artist from this period was Rivera s wife, Frida Kahlo (1907 1954). She was almost killed in a traffic accident when she was 18, and, when recuperating, she started painting, cultivating a folk style that reflected her strong interest in the power of naïve Colonial pictures (art often made by self-taught or little-trained artists) and such folk imagery as ex-votos (a Catholic folk image of religious devotion often created in gratitude for a special event in someone s life). Kahlo s imagery was personal, focusing on her state of mind, generally her tumultuous relationship with her philandering husband or her lifelong excruciating suffering from her injuries. She made easel pictures, often quite small, which, while focusing on herself, nonetheless deliberately placed her in a 10 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D Mexican context. She often presented herself in traditional Mexican clothing and jewelry, and with attributes associated with folk beliefs and superstition. We can see this focus on her own identity and psychology in her 1939 painting The Two Fridas (fig. 28.51), made when she and Rivera were divorcing. On the left is the uropean Frida, lightskinned, even sickly pale, and in Victorian dress, reflecting her father s Hungarian Jewish ancestry. To the right sits the Mexican Frida, dark-skinned and in peasant costume, reflecting her mother s Indian and Creole background. More important, this is the Frida that Rivera wanted her to be. She holds a miniature portrait of Rivera as a boy, the source of the blood coursing through her and into the uropean Frida, who has cut the connection back to her Mexican self, in effect draining the blood, and life, out of the indigenous self. The exposed heart, dripping blood, and the miniature have the surreal drama found in the Mexican ex-votos that Kahlo so admired, while the crisp contours and minimal modeling of the figures and the bench, for example, echo their plain direct folk-art style. Contrasted with these simple unarticulated passages are meticulously detailed motifs, such as the hearts and lace, which change the texture of the image, making it all the more bizarre. André reton was in Mexico in 1938 and declared Kahlo a Surrealist, a label she objected to, declaring she was not painting dreams but rather the reality of her life. Her pictures were not meant to churn the unconscious, but rather to reflect her own pain and suffering, both physical and psychological. Á L V A R E R A V O reton also added photographer Manuel Álvarez ravo (1902 2002) to his roster of Surrealists. ravo, who was self-taught, was in the muralist circle in Mexico City and was equally preoccupied with creating a Mexican art. MANUEL 28.51 Frida ahlo, The Two Fridas. 1939. Oil on canvas, 5'81*2" + 5'81*2" (1.74 + 1.74 m). Museo de Arte Moderno, nstituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City 28.52 Manuel Álvarez Bravo, La Buena Fama Durmiendo (Good Reputation Sleeping). 1938 39. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California Like Cartier-Bresson s images, Bravo s have an uncanny quality, sometimes due to an unusual juxtaposition of objects, sometimes simply because of a strange silence and mysterious shadows. n some respects, his Surrealism was the result of his quest to capture the magical essence of folk myths and superstitions, as seen in La Buena Fama Durmiendo (Good Reputation Sleeping) (fig. 28.52). Here, Bravo posed his model on the roof of the national arts school where he was teaching, having her lie on a Mexican blanket and binding her wrists, ankles, and feet as well as her pelvis and upper legs in bandages. He allows her pubic hair to show, and surrounds her with thorny cactus pears. Breton wanted to use this image for the cover of a 1940 international Surrealist exhibition he was organizing for Mexico City. Owing to the jarring relationship of prickly pears to the model, the exposed crotch, the strange tightly wound bandages, and the violent stains on the wall, it is not difficult to understand why. But Bravo s motivation was not just about evoking the pain, suffering, violence, and desire associated with sex he also wanted to encompass the intensity of local legends that went back centuries. n Mexican folklore, for example, the thorny pears are supposed to ward off danger during sleep. The bandages were inspired by watching dancers bind their CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 102 feet, which reminded Bravo of ¡re-Columbian sculptural reliefs of dancers, which were related to the earth-goddess Coatlicue, who was conceived without sexual intercourse. The image is a wonderful exercise in doctrinaire Surrealism, but at the same time it is steeped in the myth and magic of Mexican tradition, especially drawing upon indigenous and folk culture. THE E ¢ E OF £ ORLD £ AR II In ¤ctober 1929, the New York stock market crashed, unleashing the Great Depression that fanned out around the globe. The deprivation it inflicted lasted an excruciating 16 years. In ¥urope and Asia, fascists rose to power Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, and Hirohito in Japan. Communist Russia became totalitarian with the emergence of Stalin in the late 1920s. In 1931, Japan invaded continental Asia. For ¥uropean artists, the rise of Hitler was the defining influence. To those bent on establishing a democratic classless world, his policies were insane. He was aggressively militaristic, believing great nations are based on a powerful, ruthless military. He declared Aryans, Germans of Scandinavian and Teutonic descent, to be a master race, superior to all others, and claimed Germany s economic and political decline resulted from its ethnic and linguistic diversity. He especially faulted Jews and Communists for undermining German superiority, and by the late 1930s, Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, gays, the mentally and physically impaired, as well as Communists and political dissenters, were imprisoned, sent to work camps, or executed. The utopian dream of Dada, Surrealism, De Stijl, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus proved to be just that, a dream. Hitler forced the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933, and in 1937, the Nazis staged a Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, denigrating German avant-garde artists in full public view. In America, social realism and representational regional art gained at the expense of avant-garde art. While regionalists painted stoic or dynamic scenes of American fortitude and drive, others focused on the plight of the urban poor. America: The Failure of Modernity The avant-garde continued to work in abstraction through the 1930s, but in an era dominated by the terrible social ills of the Great Depression, it became increasingly difficult for artists not to be socially concerned. Many in the avant-garde got involved by becoming socialists or Communists and by supporting the labor movement, even forming their own unionlike organizations. But for many artists, political activity was not enough. Now, more and more artists worked in a style called Social Realism, a representational format that focused on such pervasive problems as poverty, labor oppression, suffering migrant workers, alienation resulting from increased urbanization and industrialization, and racism, especially as seen in the ¦u ¦lux ¦lan lynchings. 28.§¨ ©dward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning. 1930. ªil on canvas, 35 * 60" (88.9 * 152.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art. «urchase with funds from Gertrude ¬anderbilt Whitney (31.426) 1028 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D ne of the most powerful representational painters of the period was ®dward Hopper (1882 196¯), who was based in New °ork. His pictures are saturated with the alienation associated with life in the big city, and more generally with modern America. A classic Hopper is ±arly Sunday ²orning (fig. 28.53) of 193³. The image is frightening in its uncanny quiet and emptiness, qualities reinforced by the severe frozen geometry of the composition. The second-floor windows suggest a different story for each apartment, but none is forthcoming as their inhabitants remain secreted behind curtains and shades. A strange relationship exists between the fire hydrant, the barber-shop pole, and the void of the square awning-framed window between them, an uneasiness that we project onto the unseen inhabitants of the building. The harsh morning light has a theatrical intensity. Hopper s only loves outside of art were film and theater, and his paintings have a cinematic and staged quality that intimates that something is about to happen. His pictures are shrouded in mystery, and because their settings are distinctly American, the dreary psychology he portrays becomes distinctly American as well. EDWARD HOPPER WAL´ER E V A N µ The largest art patron during the ¶reat ·¸pression was the ¹nited States government, which put tens of thousands of unemployed artists to work through the Works Project Administration and Federal Art Project, important components of Franklin ·. ºoosevelt s New ·eal. What was so remarkable about these programs was their lack of racial, ethnic, or gender discrimination, which resulted in financial support for women and minorities. ne especially influential project was the Farm Security Administration (FSA). ·¸signed to document the suffering and poverty of both rural and urban Americans, the FSA hired about 2³ photographers at a time to record the desperate 28.55 Íorothea Lange, Çigrant ÇotÈerÅ Îalifornia. 1936. Ìelatin silver print, Library of Congress, Washington, Í.C. conditions of the poor. Their images were then distributed to the media, where they often had a powerful impact on public opinion. ne of the first photographers hired in 1935 was Walker ®vans (19³3 19¯5), who was fired two years later because he was stubbornly difficult and did not make the sort of images that the FSA was looking for: images that dramatically portrayed how wretched the conditions were in America. Instead, his subtle photographs focus on the nation s psychology, showing its gloom and alienation, much as Hopper s paintings did. This can be readily seen in the work reproduced here (fig. 28.54). We see a town without people, where the cemetery, workers row houses, and treeless industrial landscape of smokestacks and telephone poles summarize the denizens lives, succinctly conveying the meaningless, rote, empty life cycle of the American worker. In addition to creating a tragic mood, ®vans s genius lies in the brilliant formal play of his detailed compositions that subtly pit light against dark and vertical against horizontal. ne of the most famous images from the FSA project is ·orothea Lange s (1895 1965) ²igrant ²ot»er¼ ½alifornia (fig. 28.55). ¹sing the sharp-focus photography that had become commonplace by the 193³s, Lange created a powerful image that in its details captures the sitter s destitution, and in DOROTHEA LANGE 28.5À Walker ÂÃans, ÄraveyardÅ ÆousesÅ and Steel ÇillÅ BetÈleÈemÅ Pennsylvania. 1935. Film negative, 8 * 1ÉÊ (2É.3 * 25.4 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New Ëork. Ìift of the Farm Security Administration (569.1953) CHAPTER 28 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 10¾¿ its complex composition of hands, arms, and turned heads, the family s emotional distress. Because of this photograph and an accompanying news story, the government rushed food to California, and eventually opened relief camps for migrant workers. The immediate impact of this poignant photograph testifies to the overpowering credibility that the medium of photography can have, and we have to wonder if the article about the migrant workers had not included Lange s photograph if the government would have sent aid. Europe: The Rise of Fascism If America had to contend with economic deprivation in the 1930s, the situation was even worse in Europe, where the dark cloud of fascism added to the gloom of the worldwide financial collapse. In rapid succession, Italy, Germany, and Spain became fascist dictatorships, depriving citizens of their civil liberties and threatening the peace and security of the surrounding nations. The Enlightenment logic that had ushered in some 200 years of progress seemed to be crumbling, replaced by a world that had lost its sense as a large portion of the European population gave up their freedom and followed Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco down an authoritarian path that ended in World War II. Many artists responded to this threat to civilization. Among the first was Max Ernst, who, by the late 1920s in Paris presciently saw the threat that was coming to Western civilization. Die Ganze Stadt (see fig. 28.12), which Ernst made in 1935 36 after the rise of Hitler and which was discussed earlier in the chapter in the context of Surrealism, is more than just a dreamscape prompted by grattage and aimed at provoking our own subconscious it is an announcement that such basic human urges as greed and pride will condemn humans to failure and is a premonition of World War II. No one movement or style had a monopoly on making art protesting the rise of fascism. Certainly, postwar German Expressionists, such as Köllwitz, and Berlin Dadaist were predisposed to political protest. German Expressionism continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s, taking on forms quite different from Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter but nonetheless retaining a sense of violence, suffering, and the grotesque that can be traced back to the Renaissance. Although we looked at George Grosz within the context of Berlin Dada, he is generally viewed as a postwar German Expressionist, which considering the clear political nature and narrative character of a work like Germany, A Winter s Tale (see fig. 28.6) is perhaps a more accurate label. Another postwar Expressionist active since the 1910s was Max Beckmann MAX BECKMANN AND GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM 28.56 Max Beckmann, Departure. 1932 33. Oil on canvas, side panels 7'3*4" + 391*4" (215.3 + 99.7 cm), center panel 7'3*4" + 45 3*8" (215.3 + 115.2 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given Anonymously by Exchange 1030 PA RT I V TH E M O D E RN W O R L D (1884 1950), whose art tended to be more universal than Grosz s, focusing on the folly and despair of existence. Beckmann s pessimistic view of human nature stems from his experience in World War I, which caused him to become an Expressionist in order to reproach God for his errors. In the early 1930s, he began working in his final style, seen in Departure (fig. 2Ï.Ð6), which is one of nine enormous triptyches (inspired by the triptyches of Hieronymus Bosch) that the artist made in the last 20 years of his life. The complex symbolism in the flanking panels represents life itself, seen as endless misery filled with all kinds of physical and spiritual pain. The bright-colored center panel represents the King and Ñueen havÒingÓ freed themselves of the torture of life. Beckmann assigned specific meaning to each action and figureÔ The woman trying to make her way in the dark with the aid of a lamp is carrying the corpse of her memories, evil deeds, and failure, from which no one can ever be free so long as life beats its drum. But Beckmann believed that viewers did not need a key to his iconographyÕ any interpretation would inevitably be similar to his, at least in spirit, if not in the details. The grotesquely distorted figures, strident angular lines, jagged forms, compressed claustrophobic space, and heavy, morbid black line encasing everything reinforce the insane, hell-on-earth mood of this nightmarish image. The triptych s rich allegory and symbolism reflects Beckmann s early study of the Old Masters and his deep appreciation for the grim and disturbing imagery of Bosch and Grünewald (see pages 492 9Ö and ×Ö5 Ö7). But such narratives of mythic proportions, which only start appearing in Beckmann s art in the 19Ö0s, seem to reflect the artist s familiarity with Øarisian Surrealism. The Ùrankfurt-based Beckmann was a regular visitor to Øaris, and it appears he returned with more than just a semblance of Øicasso s palette, for he seems to have also brought home the Surrealist emphasis on myth. His hell-on-earth nightmare of bizarre and sadistic events relies on disjointed puzzling motifs that parallel the devices he saw in the dream imagery of the Surrealists. Shortly after Beckmann began Departure, life itself became surreal in Germany, for Hitler became chancellor in 19ÖÖ. Úow the Úazis turned from bullying and threats to overt violence toward their perceived enemies and inferiors, anyone they viewed as being at odds with the Aryan ideals of the Third Reich. German avant-garde art was deemed depraved and therefore ridiculed. The artists were forbidden from buying art supplies. Ûventually, their work was confiscated from museums and either destroyed or sold in Switzerland to raise money. In 19Ö7, the Úazis removed some ×50 pieces of German modern art from museums and presented them in an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art, which opened in Munich and then toured Germany for three years. Beckmann was represented in this humiliating exhibition, an event that contributed to Ûrnst Ludwig Kirchner s suicide. But by 19Ö7, Beckmann was in the ÜÝited States, a path taken by numerous other artists, including Moholy-Úagy, who established a new Bauhaus in Chicago, today the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. ã8.57 John Heartfield, As in the Middle Ages, So in the Third Reich. 19ä4. åoster, photomontage. Akademie der Kænste, John Heartfield Archiv, Berlin ÞOHN H E A R T F I E L D John Heartfield, the Berlin Dadist who, along with Grosz, Hausmann, and Höch, played a seminal role in the development of photomontage in the early 1920s, now took aim at the Úazis, creating some of his most powerful work. As in the Middle Ages, So in the Third Reich (fig. 2Ï.Ð7) is a wonderful example of his montage technique, which consisted of collaging disparate images together and then photographing them. In this poster, he juxtaposes a Úazi victim crucified on a swastika with a Gothic image of the figure of humanity punished for its sins on the wheel of divine judgment. Heartfield was not interested in the original meaning of the Gothic motifÕ he used it to imply that the Úazis had ruthlessly transported the nation back to what he viewed as the dark barbaric past of the Middle Ages. In 19Ö×, civil war broke out in Spain when conservatives loyal to the king and under the leadership of Ùranco (the Úationalists) tried to overthrow the popularly elected leftist, republican government (the Republicans or Loyalists). In some ways, it was a rehearsal for World War II. Hitler and Mussolini PAßLO PIàASSO CHAPTER á8 ART BETWEEN THE WARS 10â1 28.÷8 Pablo Picasso, Guernica. 1937. øil on canvas, 11ù6" * 25ù8" (3.51 * 7.82 m). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. øn Permanent úoan from the Museo del Prado, Madrid provided military and political support for the Nationalists, who included monarchists, fascists, and Catholics. The çoyalists consisted of Communists, socialists, and Catalan and Basque separatists, as well as the International Brigade, made up of volunteers from all over the world. èn April 26, 1937, Hitler s Nazi pilots used saturation bombing to attack the undefended Basque town of Guernica, killing thousands of civilians. Picasso, like most of the free world, was outraged, and responded by painting Guernica (fig. 28.5ê), an enormous black, white, and gray mural that he exhibited as a protest at the Spanish Republican Pavilion of the 1937 Paris International Exposition. He pulled every artistic device out of his Cubist and Surrealist arsenal to create a nightmarish scene of pain, suffering, grief, and death. We see no airplanes and no bombs, and the electric lightbulb is the only sign of the modernity that made the bombing possible. The symbolism of the scene resists exact interpretation, despite several traditional elementsë The mother and her dead child are descendants of the Pietì, the woman with the lamp who vaguely recalls the Statue of çiberty suggests enlightenment, and the dead fighter clutching a broken sword is a familiar emblem of heroic resistance. We also sense the contrast between the menacing human-faced bull, which we know Picasso intended to represent the forces of brutality and darkness, and the dying horse, which stands for the people. Picasso insisted, however, that the mural was not a political statement about fascism, and it is interesting that many of the figures were used quite differently in Picasso s earlier work. The horse and bull are motifs from the bullfight, which Picasso had 10ôõ PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D been using since the early 1930s as a metaphor for sexual conflict. The presence of the huge vulva-shaped tear on the side of the horse is certainly not a coincidence. Nor is that of the same sexual orifice on the inside of the sword-holding arm broken off of a Classical statue of a soldier. Nor is it coincidence that the flames on the back of the supplicating woman on the right remind us of the sawtooth groin of the sexually aggressive dancer in Three Dancers (see fig. 28.9), or that the quarter-moon silhouetted against a rooster s head just beyond her flailing breast reminds us of the same dancer s moon-shaped head. And is it coincidence that this figure, who resembles a Mary Magdalene at the Cross, also brings to mind Goya s supplicating rebel in The Third of Mayí îïðï (see fig. 24.3)? If it were not for the title, there is not much to indicate this is not another of Picasso s images about the tormenting psychology of sexual conflict that we saw as far back as ñes Demoiselles d òóignon (see fig. 27.5) of 1907. But the title cannot be ignored nor the smashed statue of a soldier, the suffering women and children, the political use of the painting at the International Exposition, and the fact that it was made in response to the destruction of Guernica. When Picasso denied that this was an antifascist picture, he may very well have meant in part that this monumental mural was more than just mundane propaganda against Franco and his ilk. çike Beckmann s Departure, we cannot help but feel that this horrifying image is meant to portray the psychology of a world in perpetual conflict and misery albeit using sexual imagery to convey this message, but this is what Picasso knew best. In Guernica, however, Picasso, unlike Beckmann, does not provide a boat to take us away to safety. Art Between the Wars 1900 * 1900 Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams 1910 * 1910 20 Mexican Revolution ca. 1910 40 The Great Migration, as 1.6 million African Americans move from the South to the North, Midwest, and West 1917 Duchamp s Fountain 1919 20 Vladimir Tatlin s Project for Monument to the Third International 1920 22 Joseph Stella s The Voice of the City 1917 Piet Mondrian with others forms De Stijl 1926 Georgia O Keefe s Black Iris III * 1920 * 1929 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designs German Pavilion for International Exposition, Barcelona * * 1919 Walter Gropius founds the Bauhaus which is relocated to Dessau in 1925 1920 First Dada International Fair, Berlin 1920 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed giving women the right to vote 1924 André Breton publishes his first Surrealist Manifesto 1925 Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Art, Paris, launching Art Deco style 1934 Diego Rivera s Man, Controller of the Universe, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City * 1929 Great Depression begins * 1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt launches the New Deal * 1936 Spanish Civil War begins, with rise of Francisco Franco as dictator 1930 1936 Meret Oppenheim s Object (Luncheon in Fur) 1936 Dorothea Lange s Migrant Mother, California * 1939 John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath 1939 World War II begins 1940 1937 Picasso s Guernica 1033 S CHOLARS TRADITIONALLY VIEW WORLD WAR II (1939 45) A S CHAPTER 29 Postwar to Postmodern, 1945 1980 A turning point for the art world, the time when its focus shifted from Paris to New York and when America s first major art movement, Abstract Expressionism, captured the world s attention, even dominating world art. In fact, the 1950s, not the 1940s, were the watershed for the second half of the century. It was then that Duchamp s preoccupation with how art functions became a driving force as the decade progressed. Likewise, many artists became obsessed with the concept, also rooted in the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque, that art and image making were a form of language, and they dedicated their work to revealing the structure of this visual language and the complex ways it could be used to present ideas and opinions, even to deceive and manipulate. It was also in the 1950s that artists, again following Duchamp s lead, realized that art need not be limited to the traditional mediums, such as oil on canvas or cast bronze or chiseled marble. It did not have to hang on a wall or sit on a pedestal. Artists could use anything to make art, and by the late 1950s and 1960s, they did. They made art with televisions, film, junk, earth, fluorescent lights, steel tiles, acrylics, entire environments, postcards, and words. Performance Art, Earthworks, Conceptual Art, Mail Art, Happenings, and Video Art are just a handful of the movements and mediums that sprang up from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. In part, this burst of new mediums reflects the expansive spirit of the period, especially in America. World War II ended 16 years of financial depression and deprivation, and by the 1950s, the Detail of figure 29.2, Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 United States had become a nation of consumers. Returning soldiers, eager to resume their lives, married and had children in record numbers, creating the baby-boom generation. Americans in large numbers moved from cities to new cookie-cutter tract houses in the suburbs. And as never before, they shopped these new homes often had several cars, power boats, barbeque grills and lawn furniture, washing machines, self-cleaning ovens, televisions sets, transistor radios, stereo record players, and homemovie cameras and projectors. As suggested by these last items, Americans as never before chased the latest technology, which was developing quickly in part due to World War II and now the Cold War waged between the Communist U.S.S.R and the democratic West and which was characterized by fighter jets, helicopters, the hydrogen bomb, missiles, rocket ships, satellites, and space travel. The new postwar American lifestyle, however, was not equally available to all. Magazines, newspapers, film, and the new medium of television reflected the reality of a distinct hierarchy within American democracy, with white males heading up a patriarchal society that viewed women, people of color, and gays as second-class citizens. It was a decade of conformity, symbolized at one extreme by the white businessman in a gray flannel suit climbing the corporate ladder while the prim housewife tended the family and house, played golf and tennis at the country club, and participated in the PTA and church activities. Beatniks, Zen Buddhists, avant-garde jazz musicians, bikers, and urban gangs of CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1035 Amsterdam NORT H AM ER ICA Mi ss MEXICO WEST GERMANY Vienna SWITZ. AUSTRIA ROMANIA ROM MANIA FRANCE Belgrade Paris AUSTRIA SWITZ. Milan ITALY Marseilles 200 km ITALY SPAIN Madrid Medite rr ALGERIA Mexico City PACIFIC OCEAN S OUTH AM ER IC A an Sea AFR ICA BANGLADESH BANGLADES ESH EGYPT CHINA Dacca NATO C ari b b ean Sea Se a TURKEY GREECE GREE ECE ne Black Sea Istanbul MOROCCO O CE AN CUBA BULG LGARIA BULGARIA Rome See inset PORTUGAL 200 miles AT L ANT I C Gulf of Mexico Moscow USSR a Amarillo DENMARK l Ba GREAT HOLLAND BRITAIN EAST Berlin GERMANY POLAND London Munich Zürich pi Denver San Francisco Fresno Valencia Los Angeles Boltons NOVA Toronto Landing SCOTIA IA Detroit Woodstock Chicago East Hampton Pittsburgh New ew York Washington, D.C. Princeton Philadelphia Black Mountain BOHEMIA ip i CZECH REPUBLIC e iss M i ss o UNITED STATES ur ub Dan Ronchamp FRANCE Great Salt Lake Darmstadt SWEDEN NORWAY S ea GERMANY Paris Berlin Düsseldorf Dessau Cologne Weimar Brussels CANADA Vancouver Hamburg ti c N Warsaw Pact, 1955 1991 1,000 km INDIA Bay of Bengal VIETNAM VIE VI IET TNAM 800 km 800 miles 1,000 miles Map 29.1 Cold War alliances juvenile delinquents established alternative lifestyles in the late 1940s and 1950s. But it was the Civil Rights Movement that first seriously challenged the status quo in the second half of the 1950s, gaining tremendous momentum in the following decade. Spurred also by the Vietnam War (1959 75), which generated persistent antiwar protests, the mid-1960s began a period of social upheaval that reached a feverish pitch in the 1970s, producing the feminist movement, Gay Pride, Black Power, Gray Power, and environmental groups such as Greenpeace. It was an age of liberation aimed at shattering the status quo and questioning the validity of any claim to superiority or fixed truth. And in the forefront was art, which by the 1950s was challenging the existence of absolutes. But before this artistic revolution could occur, the center of the art world had to move from Paris to New York. This coup, often referred to as the Triumph of New York Painting, coincided with the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. EXISTENTIALISM IN NEW YORK: ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Abstract Expressionism evolved out of Surrealism, which traced its roots to the Dada movement of the 1910s (see page 985). Like the Surrealists, the Abstract Expressionists were preoccupied with a quest to uncover universal truths. In this sense, their heritage goes back to Kandinsky and Malevich as well (see pages 958 and 966). In many respects, Abstract Expressionism is the culmination of the concerns of the artists of the first half of the twentieth 1036 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D century. But the Abstract Expressionists were also driven by a deep-seated belief in Existentialism, a philosophy that came to the fore with the devastation caused by World War II. The war shattered not only faith in science and logic, but even the very concept of progress, the idea that it was possible to create a better world. A belief in absolute truths had been abandoned. Existentialism maintains that there are no absolute truths no ultimate knowledge, explanations, or answers and that life is a continuous series of subjective experiences from which each individual learns and then correspondingly responds in a personal way. Essential to this learning process is facing the direst aspects of human existence fear of death, the absurdity of life, and alienation from individuals, society, and nature and taking responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong, good, or bad. The Abstract Expressionists, like so many intellectuals after the war, embraced this subjective view of the world. Their art was a personal confrontation with the moment, reflecting upon their physical, psychological, and social being. The Bridge from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism: Arshile Gorky Surrealism dominated New York art in the early 1940s. In late 1936, the seven-year-old Museum of Modern Art mounted the blockbuster exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, an eye-opener for many New York artists. Some artists not converted by the exhibition were nevertheless swayed by the dramatic influx of European artists who fled the Continent shortly before and during World War II. André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, and Max Ernst were just a few of the many artists and intellectuals who sought the safety of Manhattan and were a powerful presence in the art world. Peggy Guggenheim, a flamboyant American mining heiress who had been living in Europe, returned to New York and opened a gallery, Art of This Century, which featured Surrealism. Surrealism was everywhere, and many New York artists took to it enthusiastically. Just as Dada developed into Surrealism, New York Surrealism seamlessly evolved into Abstract Expressionism. The transformation occurred when all of the symbols and suggestions of myths and primordial conditions disappeared, and images dissolved into a complete abstraction containing no obvious references to the visible world. We can see the beginning of this process in the paintings of Arshile Gorky (1904 1948), an Armenian immigrant, whose family fled Armenia to escape the genocide of the ruling Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Gorky s mother died of starvation in his arms in a Russian refugee camp. By the 1930s, Gorky was in New York, where, over the next decade, his Cubist style began to evolve toward complete abstraction. At his wife s farm in Connecticut, he would dash off minimal abstract line drawings inspired by nature. In the studio, he would then develop, often using preparatory drawings, these linear patterns into paintings, similar to his 1944 surrealistically titled The Liver Is the Cock s Comb (fig. 29.1). Here, we see wiry black-line drawing and washes of predominantly red, blue, yellow, and black playing off of one another, giving a sense of how the composition developed as a series of psychological reactions with one mark or color triggering the next, and so on until completion. While the painting has echoes of Miró s biomorphic shapes (see fig. 28.13), Masson s automatic drawing (see page 995), and Kandinsky s color and cosmic chaos (see fig. 27.14), it is more abstract and flatter than the work of his predecessors, with the image kept close to the surface. We cannot safely read much into the picture other than a feeling of a landscape filled with some kind of organic animation, perhaps genitalia and figures, which seem eruptive, violent, and in conflict. In fact, many scholars have suggested that Gorky s abstractions refer to the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, but again, the picture is too abstract to interpret. What stands out as a prominent theme is the art process itself, our sense of how the image was made and how it seems to have been determined by Gorky s own powerful emotions. Gorky was one of the last two artists that Breton anointed a Surrealist, a label Gorky rejected, since he undoubtedly saw himself as expressing his innermost feelings and memories, not exploring his repressed self. 29.1 Arshile Gorky, The Liver Is the Cock s Comb. 1944. Oil on canvas, 6'1*4" + 8'2" (1.86 + 2.49 m). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1956 CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1037 PRIMARY SOURCE Jackson Pollock (1912 1956) From My Painting In 1947, when these remarks were recorded, Pollock rejected the usual easel format by placing his unstretched canvases directly on the floor. Using ordinary paint, he claimed he was not just throwing paint but delineating some real thing in the air above the canvas. M y painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West. Abstract Expressionism: Action Painting Three years later, in 1947, Jackson Pollock made the physical act of energetically applied paint the gesture the undisputed focus of painting. This is not to say that his abstract gesture paintings are just about the art process, because that process is now a metaphor for the human condition, which previously had been represented through hieroglyphs and biomorphic forms. Almost simultaneously, a second artist emerged, Willem de Kooning, who I continue to get further away from the usual painter s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added. When I am in my painting, I m not aware of what I m doing. It is only after a sort of get acquainted period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well. The source of my painting is the unconscious. I approach painting the same way I approach drawing. That is direct with no preliminary studies. The drawings I do are relative to my painting but not for it. Source: Possibilities, I (winter 1947 48), p. 79. Reprinted in by Francis V. O Conor, Jackson Pollock (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1967) similarly employed bold gestural abstraction to express his innermost feelings. P O L L O C K Through the 1930s, Jackson Pollock (1912 1956) was a marginal figure in the art world who worked odd jobs, including being a custodian at what is today called the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In the early 1940s, just when he started Jungian psychoanalysis, he became a hardcore Surrealist, making crude but powerful paintings filled with JACKSON 29.2 Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm: Number 30. 1950. Enamel on canvas, 105 * 207" (266.7 * 525.8 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, George A. Hearn Fund, 1957 (57.92) 1038 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D slapdash hieroglyphs, totems, and references to primitive myth, whipped about in a swirling sea of paint. His big break came in 1943 when Peggy Guggenheim exhibited his work at her gallery, Art of This Century, and gave him a stipend to paint. At the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948, Pollock unveiled his first gesture or action paintings, the latter term being coined in the 1950s by art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906 1978). A famous example of this style is ûýtýmþ ÿhythm ýmber (fig. 29.2) of 1950, an 8-by-17-foot wall of house paint that was applied by dripping, hurling, pouring, and splattering when the unstretched canvas was on the floor. Pollock had worked on it from all four sides, and he claimed that its source was his unconscious. (See rim ry oýrce, page 1038.) Despite the apparent looseness of his style, Pollock exerted great control over his medium by changing the viscosity of the paint, the size of the brush or stick he used to apply the paint, and the speed, reach, and direction of his own movements, and he rejected many paintings when the paint did not fall as anticipated. The energy of the painting is overwhelming, and from its position on a wall the work looms above us like a frozen wave. Our eye jumps from one stress to another from a white blob, to a black splash, to a Masson-like automatic line, and so on. There is no focus upon which the eye can rest. Because of these even stresses throughout the image, Pollock s compositions are also often described as allover paintings. Pollock constructed his picture as he went along, with each new move playing off the previous one, and emotional intuition dictating the next gesture. The resulting image is not just a record of the physical self, but also of the psychological being. Because the artist must face the challenge of the bare canvas and the risktaking responsibility of making each mark, painting becomes a metaphor for the challenges of the human condition and the risks inherent in taking responsibility for one s actions, particularly in an Existentialist world. World War II dashed the blind belief in the superiority of science, progress, and utopian societies. The one thing that could be trusted and believed in was the self, and th t became the sole subject of Abstract Expressionist painting. :N 30 P a S n 29.3 Willem de Kooning, om I. 1950 52. Oil on canvas, 757*8 + 58" (1.93 + 1.47 m). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase a Pollock s style was too personal to spawn significant followers. The gesture painter who launched an entire generation of painters was Willem de Kooning (1904 1997), a Dutch immigrant, who quietly struggled at his art for decades in New York s Greenwich Village. Encouraged by his friend and mentor Arshile Gorky, de Kooning made Picassoinspired Cubist-Surrealist paintings in the 1940s, mostly of women. He finally got his first one-person show in 1948, at the Egan Gallery, when he was 44. The radical works he presented appeared to be total abstractions of dramatically painted curving lines and shapes that entirely covered the canvas with the same evenness as in Pollock s allover paintings. Despite the spontaneity implied by the bravura paint handling, the pictures were laboriously crafted, often using methods similar to those of the Surrealists. For example, de Kooning fired his imagination by pinning line drawings on his canvas, not only at the beginning but throughout the process. Charcoal lines WILLEM DE KOONING drawn on dried paint to both provoke and experiment with composition sometimes remained in the final picture. He jump-started other paintings by inscribing large letters across the canvas. Like Pollock, he constructed the paintings through a continuous process of gestural reactions based on intuition and emotion, with the resulting marks reflecting his presence, feeling, and uncontrollable urges. Unlike Pollock, however, de Kooning s Expressionist paint handling retained the push-pull of Cubist space and composition, with one painterly form residing above or below another. De Kooning shocked the art world with his second exhibition, held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953. He did the unthinkable for an Abstract Expressionist: He made representational paintings, depicting women, as seen in om þ I (fig. 29.3), a work he struggled with from 1950 to 1952. It now became clear that the curvilinear patterning of the earlier abstractions was as sexual as everyone had suspected, or as the critic Tom Hess put it, the works were covert celebrations of orgiastic sexuality. De Kooning reportedly painted and completely repainted om þ I W a W a CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1039 hundreds of times on the same canvas, and he also made numerous other paintings of women in the summer of 1952 when he was in East Hampton on ong Island, New York. The process of making the picture was almost as important as the final product, as though it were a ritualistic catharsis of sorts. Woman I is by far the most violent and threatening of numerous paintings in the Women series, the other women having a neutral appearance and embodying a broad range of attributes. Nonetheless, de Kooning intended Woman I to be e ually unfixed in meaning, or as open to interpretation. He was surprised that viewers did not see the humor in his threatening, wide-eyed, snarling figure, which was based as much on contemporary advertisements of models smoking Camel cigarettes as on primitive fertility goddesses, such as the Paleolithic Woman of Willendorf (see fig. 1.14), both of which the artist cited as sources. In the Women series, as in all of his paintings, de Kooning played out his own ambivalent emotions, which, because they constantly changed, allowed him to keep repainting his figure. L q Abstract Expressionism: Color-Field Painting Abstract Expressionism had a flip side. If one side was gestural painting, then the other was color-field painting. Instead of bombastic brushstrokes and the overt drama of paint, these painters used large meditative planes of color to express the innermost primal ualities that linked them to universal forces. The objective of the color-field painters, like that of their gestural counterparts, was to project the sublime human condition as they themselves felt it. The principal color-field painters Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clifford Still all started out by making mythinspired abstract Surrealist paintings in the 1940s and were close friends until 1952. q Mark Rothko (1903 1970) ranks among the best-known color-field painters. His paintings from the 1940s draw heavily from Greek tragedy, such as Aeschylus Oresteia, and from Christ s Passion cycle and death scenes with a harrowing psychology where the lone individual faces ultimate truths about existence, death, and spirituality. But all suggestion of figuration disappeared in 1947. In 1949, Rothko arrived at his mature style, from which he did not deviate for the remainder of his life. Now, Rothko s paintings consisted of flat planes of color stacked directly on top of one another, as in the 10-foot-high 1953 work No. 61 (Rust and Blue) (fig. 29.4). There is no longer any storytelling, nor any hieroglyphics or symbols, even in the title. But the painting is still mythic, for the artist has painted what he himself has confronted, the inevitable void of our common future and our sense of mystical oneness with unseen cosmic forces, a theme reminiscent of Caspar David riedrich s Abbey in an Oak Forest (see fig. 24.8). Rothko s subject, he explained, was tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. His ethereal planes are so thin, color glimmers through from behind and below, creating a shimmering spiritual light. Their edges are ragged, and like clouds dissipating in the sky, they seem precariously fragile. Although the painting 29.4 Mark Rothko. No. 61 (Rust and Blue) (also known as Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue). 1953. Oil on canvas, 1153*4 + 911*4" (2.94 + 2.32 m). Museum of Contemporary Art, os Angeles. The Pan a Collection MARK ROTHKO F 1040 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D is not about process, we feel Rothko s hand building up the planes with individual marks, giving the work a poignant organic uality. Space is paradoxically claustrophobic and infinite. On the one hand, the planes literally crowd the picture to the edges and hover at the very front of the picture plane, while on the other hand, the pervasive blue ground seems to continue forever, uncontained by the edge of the canvas and suggesting infinity. Enormous shifts in scale give a sense of the sublime. Note, for instance, the tiny, thin wisp of soft white on the bottom of the middle plane, which seems so insignificant in comparison to the enormous planes and the vast si e of the canvas. Regardless of the palette, whether bright yellows and oranges or the more moody blues and browns in No. 61, the colors in a Rothko painting have a smoldering resonance that makes the image seem to glow from within and evoke a spiritual aura. Rothko wanted viewers to stand close to his enormous iconic images, which would tower over them, and where they would be immersed in this mystical void of the unknown future, as if standing on the precipice of infinity and death. After making a series of predominantly dark paintings, Rothko committed suicide in 1970. q z New York Sculpture: David Smith and Louise Nevelson ike the Abstract Expressionist painters, the avant-garde sculptors of the postwar period were originally Surrealists, and most were similarly steeped in Existentialist philosophy. Some, like David Smith, developed their compositions as they worked on their sculptures, which were largely abstract. Others, like ouise Nevelson, retained the hieroglyphic signs of Surrealism but now began working on an enormous scale, in part spurred by the scale of Abstract Expressionist painting. Along with Alexander Calder (see page 1001), who returned to America with World War II, David Smith (1906 1965) was perhaps the most visible American sculptor at midcentury. He began as a painter, but upon seeing illustrations of welded steel sculpture by Picasso and Gonz lez (see pages 994 95), he adopted the blowtorch as his tool and metal as his medium, which he used throughout his career. He was friendly with the Abstract Expressionist painters, and even after moving to a farm in Bolton s anding in upstate New York in 1940, he periodically came to the city for long periods and socialized with them in Greenwich illage. Smith was steeped in the Existentialist philosophy of his circle, and, like his colleagues, he dedicated his work to expressing his physical and psychological being. His career follows a path similar to Rothko s, moving from Surrealist sculptures that were basically drawings of organic forms in space, suggestive of Miró, to totally á V abstract iconic forms. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Smith constructed his sculptures from large reserves of metal that he always had on hand, working not so much from preliminary sketches and preconceived notions of a finished product but, like de Kooning and Pollock, by a continuous chain of reactions to each gesture, which in his case would be made in a welded material. Despite his working method, which allowed him to work and think in the round, he generally conceived his sculptures like paintings, to be seen almost two-dimensionally from a single viewpoint. An example of Smith s late, iconic style is the Cubi series (fig. 29.5), begun in 1961 and consisting of 18 works. Because of its severe geometry, the Cubi series is unusual for Smith. He did not have e uipment to cut stainless steel, and conse uently was forced to order it from the manufacturer in precut rectangular shapes, which he assembled into boxes of different sizes that he welded together based on intuition and personal emotion. Despite their relentless geometry, these enormous sculptures are hardly mechanical and unemotional. They are both anthropomorphic and totemic, evoking giant figures and ritualistic structures. They have the sublime presence of a prehistoric monument and embrace a powerful spirituality. It is as though the elemental forms, placed on a tabletop altar, are the very building blocks of the universe itself, their sense of movement and solidity reflecting the essence of life, their precarious arrangement the inevitable impermanence of all things. Smith ended by burnishing the steel, giving it a textured finish. And because we can feel his touch here, the work takes on a surprising organic uality. t 29.5 David Smith, Cubi series as installed at Bolton s anding, New York. Stainless steel. ef Cubi XVIII. 1964. Height 9'8" (2.95 m). Museum of ine Arts, Boston. Center Cubi XVII. 1963. Height 9' (2.74 m). Dallas Museum of Art. Right Cubi XIX. 1964. Height 9'5" (2.87 m). Tate Gallery, ndon CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1041 29.6 Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral Moon Garden Plus One. 1957 60. Painted wood, black, 9'1" * 10'2" * 1'7" (2.78 * 3.1 * 0.5 m). Collection of Milly and Arne Glimcher, New York. Courtesy PaceWilderstein, New York Smith s work became dramatically larger in the 1950s, influenced, in part, by the scale of Abstract Expressionist painting. Another Surrealist sculptor followed suit: Louise Nevelson (1900 1988), who emerged in the 1940s. By the 1950s, she was working with fragments of black-painted wood assembled in mysterious black boxes, and by the end of the decade, she began making enormous walls of these boxes. One of these is Sky Cathedral Moon Garden Plus One (fig. 29.6), produced from 1957 to 1960. In it, fragments of furniture and architecture become provocative Surrealist objects in a poetic dreamlike setting. We sense we are looking at the flotsam and jetsam of civilization, the fragments of people s lives, of people long gone. But as the title suggests, Nevelson s forms also evoke landscape and the cosmos, the round shapes suggesting the planets and moons, the splintered wood the mountains, and the accumulation of boards the rock formations. Nevelson wanted her black works (others are all gold or white) illuminated by a blue light, which would suggest twilight, the moment of transformation, when things begin to look different and to change into something else, swallowed up by unseen mystical forces. EXISTENTIALISM IN EUROPE: FIGURAL EXPRESSIONISM Abstract Expressionism was identified with the United States, which in the late 1950s began exporting the work to Europe in exhibitions sponsored by the federal government. These shows, ostensibly for the sake of good international public relations, 1042 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D strutted the country s artistic superiority and virility, and complemented its military, financial, and technological dominance. They were cultural pawns in the Cold War. While Europeans developed a counterpart to Abstract Expressionism, perhaps the best-known Existentialist painting was figurative. Two especially powerful artists were Jean Dubuffet and Francis Bacon. Both were loners, with no group or movement affiliations, and artistically kept to themselves, independently developing their own responses to the existential loneliness of human existence. Jean Dubuffet As a young man, the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet (1901 1985) was an unlikely candidate for artistic fame. Until the early 1940s, his commitment to, and even his belief in, art was intermittent, and he often worked for a family wine business. Many of his attitudes paralleled Dada: He was antiart and antibourgeois. What interested him most was finding a way to see beyond the blinders of civilization, with its limited concepts of beauty and reality. As had Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian before him, Dubuffet sought to reveal higher truths, namely the interconnectedness of all things in the universe. Critical to Dubuffet s development was his discovery in the early 1940s of the art of the untrained and insane, which he called Art Brut (literally, Raw Art ) and collected. He felt artists untouched by conventional training were uninhibited by the superego and expressed primal urges and desires that were directly connected to mystical forces. Graffiti, children s art anything equally unrestrained and spontaneously produced fell Francis Bacon Across the English Channel in London, Francis Bacon (1909 1992), a second loner, was stirring up the art world by expressing his own existential angst. One look at his Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef (fig. 29.8) of 1954 and we realize we are in the presence of one of the more frightening images of the twentieth century. Bacon emerged as a force on the London art scene right after World War II, and it is tempting to view his horrific pictures as a statement about the senseless savagery he had just witnessed. But Bacon s themes were already in place well before the war, and presumably they stem largely from his own horrible circumstances, which included abuse as a child and an adult life dominated by the classic vices of alcohol, gambling, and promiscuous sex. We cannot be sure that these experiences account for Bacon s work, for unlike Dubuffet and the Abstract Expressionists, for example, Bacon did not pontificate about art, issue manifestos, or declare that painting had to fill social voids. Like his Existentialist contemporaries, he painted from the gut, claiming that when he started a picture he had no idea where he would end up. His first painting based on Velázquez s Pope Innocent X (there are 45 versions), which is the source for the central figure in Head 29.7 Jean Dubuffet, Le Métafisyx, from the Corps de Dames series. 1950. Oil on canvas, 453*4 + 351*4" (116.2 + 89.5 cm). Musée d Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris into this same category. Dubuffet adopted these direct untutored styles in his own art because he believed they represented a universal language that anyone could understand and appreciate. The second major ingredient in Dubuffet s worldview is the concept that all things are equally consecrated because everything is composed of the same matter and energy. We can see this virtually illustrated in Le Métafisyx (fig. 29.7), painted in 1950 in his Art Brut style. Here, he literally etches his woman into a deep bed of paint, which is crude and rough, suggesting earth, ancient plaster walls, and stone. Not only is this comic-repulsive, soilencrusted woman identified with mineral matter, she is also timeless, for she resembles an archaeological find excavated from a remote prehistoric site. The frenetic graffitilike style is so abstract, we can read the figure in endless ways and even see the scratchy wiry lines as representing an unseen energy that courses through all things. There is even the suggestion of the body dissolving back into elemental matter. Le Métafisyx is part of a series called Corps de Dames (Women s Bodies), which in its crude drawing and grating texture was meant to shock, challenging the art world s conventional notions of beauty and art. 29.8 Francis Bacon, Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef. 1954. Oil on canvas, 511*8 + 48" (129.9 + 121.9 cm). Unframed. The Art Institute of Chicago. Harriott A. Fox Fund. 1956.1201 CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1043 Surrounded by Sides of Beef, supposedly began as a garden scene. Our painting not only refers to the Velázquez portrait, but also to a contemporary photograph of Pope Pius XII (whose bespectacled head we see), a Rembrandt painting of a flayed ox, and a still of a nurse screaming in the 1925 classic silent film Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein (1898 1948). In most of Bacon s paintings based on Velázquez s Pope Innocent X, the focal point is the primal scream of the sitter, the wide dark pit of the opened mouth. In our figure, however, this motif is not nearly as prominent, as it is balanced by the crucified slab of beef that frames the sitter. Add the black void, the claustrophobic compression of the glass cage, and the gritty quality of sections of the paint surface, and we have a house of horror, obviously the chamber of the artist s grim psyche. A viewer cannot get back from the scene, which seems thrown in one s face by the bold brushwork that prominently sits on the surface of the canvas, pulling the image along with it and toward us. Bacon said of his paintings, You can t be more horrific than life itself. REJECTING ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: AMERICAN ART OF THE 1950s AND 1960s By the mid-1950s other styles were already beginning to overshadow Abstract Expressionism. The 1950s planted the seeds of a cultural revolution, producing a thirst for freedom of expression that required the invention of radically new art forms. Combines, environments, Happenings, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art took art into uncharted territory, breaking down the barriers that had previously narrowly restricted art to certain standard mediums. Re-Presenting Life and Dissecting Painting No one person or event triggered the dramatic change that occurred in art in the 1950s, but artist Robert Rauschenberg and musical composer John Cage certainly played major roles. Rauschenberg probably spoke for many when he explained why he rejected Abstract Expressionism: It was all about suffering and self-expression and the State of Things. I just wasn t interested in that, and I certainly did not have any interest in trying to improve the world through painting. Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg s close friend at the time, similarly rejected Abstract Expressionism. While both artists made paintings that had the gestural mark making of the Abstract Expressionists, these works were an intellectual, impersonal analysis of art rather than an explosion of feelings and primal urges. R O B E R T R A U S C H E N B E R G A N D J O H N C A G E Robert Rauschenberg (1925 2008) was a Texan from a working-class family who ended up in New York studying painting by 1947. A critical component of his development was attending the avant-garde 1044 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 29.9 Robert Rauschenberg, Odalisk. 1955 58. Mixed media, 6'9" * 2'1" * 2'1" (205.7 * 63.5 * 63.5 cm). Museum Ludwig, Cologne Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the fall of 1948, and again in 1951 and 1952. The painting department at the small liberal arts school was headed by Josef Albers (1888 1976), who, with his wife, Anni (1899 1994), had taught at the Bauhaus, in Germany (see pages 1007 10). Rauschenberg did not care for Albers as a teacher, but the institution encouraged experimentation, which turned Rauschenberg away from pure painting, toward an analysis of the very concept of art. At Black Mountain in 1951, he made a series of White Paintings, which he exhibited at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1953. These were large canvases painted a solid white, with no evidence of brushwork. Viewers wondered what they were supposed to see. Themselves, for one thing. Their shadows were cast on the canvases, which also caught reflected colored light and accumulated dust and dirt. These canvases captured real life, which was presented without comment or meaning. Viewers could read anything into them that they wanted. Like Duchamp, Rauschenberg was making Conceptual Art, determined by chance, and aimed at capturing the world without attaching any firm meaning in that process. In their objective neutrality, these extraordinary paintings were the antithesis of the intensely personal Abstract Expressionism, which ruled the day. One of the people who thoroughly understood the White Paintings was John Cage (1912 1992), an avant-garde composer who was garnering a reputation for his works for altered piano, a piano with objects placed under the strings to change their sound. In response to the White Paintings, Cage wrote 4'33", a piano piece first performed in Woodstock, New York, in 1952. The work was played by a pianist who sat down and opened the keyboard and did nothing else for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. During this time the audience listened to the sounds of the real world: the shuffling, coughing, and whispering in the recital hall and the sounds of falling rain and chirping birds coming in through an open window. The last sound was the keyboard case being shut, signaling the end of the piece. These and many other conceptual works from this period were designed to remove the artist from the work of art as well as to ask such questions as: What is art? How does it function? Rauschenberg picked up where Duchamp had left off. His art, however, is never meant to shock or destroy, and his attitude and approach are always positive. He is a presenter, not a nihilist. He is a collector of life, which he gathers up and energetically presents for us to think about and interpret for ourselves. Furthermore, he was not interested in painting life, but in representing it. I don t want a picture to look like something it isn t. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a picture is more like the real world when it s made out of the real world. In 1955, Rauschenberg incorporated the real world into his art when he began making combines, innovative works that combined painting, sculpture, collage, and found objects, as in his there is Odalisk (fig. 29.9) of 1955 58. This four-sided lamp an electric light inside is crowded with collaged material culled from contemporary magazines and newspapers as well as detritus from the street and from thrift shops. Even the title is part of this busy collage, for it has to be considered when we try to construct a narrative for the work. But is there a narrative in this poetic collage of disparate materials? Obviously, Odalisk has a subject, for it is filled with sexual innuendo: the phallic pole jammed into the pillow on the bottom, the stuffed cock mounted above the nude pinup with a dog howling at her from below, the comic strip of a woman in bed being surprised by a man (on a side of the sculpture not pictured here). Even the title, which is a pun on the female odalisque (see fig. 24.13) and phallic obelisk (a tall, tapering stone monument), can be interpreted sexually. But the artist places no value on materials, suggests no interpretation, makes no grand statement. The work just is. It is our materials, our time, our life. Rauschenberg re-presents it with extraordinary formal powers and with a poetry of paint and collage. In its energy and fragmentation, the work powerfully captures the spirit of the constantly changing world and the fractured way we experience it. In 1954, Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and moved into a loft in the same run-down building in lower Manhattan. Although Johns incorporated objects into his paintings before Rauschenberg made his combines, he is primarily a painter, and his works are literally about painting. This can be seen in Three Flags, a work of 1958 (fig. 29.10). Because of the Americana theme, many writers talk about this painting as Pop Art, a style that in New York emerges in the early 1960s and derives its imagery from popular culture. American pride surged in the postwar period as the United States emerged as the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the world. More than ever before, images of the flag were everywhere and an integral part of vernacular culture. Three Flags, however, is not about popular culture, for it is part of series in which the artist repeatedly painted flat objects, such as numbers, targets, and maps, with the intention of eliminating the need to paint illusionistic depth. Here, he has painted a flat object (a flag) on a flat surface (the canvas), so we are not tempted to read, for example, a white star as sitting on top of a blue field because we know it does not. Furthermore, Johns does not place the flag in any context that allows us to read specific meaning or emotion into it. The flag is a sign to which Johns has attached no specific meaning or emotion. In other words, Johns has created a nonillusionistic, impersonal image. What we are left to look at is how the picture was made. Johns s very beautiful and methodical application of wax-based encaustic paint reminds us that a painting consists of paint on canvas. And, of course, painting can be about color, here red, white, and blue. Lest we forget that a painting is a three-dimensional object, Johns has stacked three flag paintings one atop another. We see their sides and hence their depth. Lastly, Johns reminds us that painting can produce an image. However, he does not give us an illusionistic image; we would never mistake Johns s flag for a real flag. As such, Johns tells us an image is a sign, that painting is an abstract language, just like verbal language. Just as a word is a sign, standing for something else, so too is painting; it signifies something else, just as numbers and maps are signs for something else. JASPER JOHNS CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1045 29.10 Jasper Johns, Three Flags. 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 307*8 + 451*2 + 5" (78.4 + 115.6 + 12.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York While the intellectual gymnastics in Johns s paintings are complex and rigorous, the works themselves are objective, devoid of any emotion. ike Rauschenberg, Johns paved a way for artists to break away from the subjectivity and vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism. His powerful assertion of the properties of painting and its inherent flatness would inspire numerous artists in the following decades. Environments and Performance Art Rauschenberg s combines played a major role in setting off a chain reaction that caused an explosion of art making that entirely redefined art. Art was no longer just painting, sculpture, and work on paper now, it took on the form of limitless mediums and moved out of galleries and museums into the real world, sometimes interacting with daily life, other times taking place in such faraway locations that few people ever got to see it. Art was often no longer an object rather it could be temporary and ephemeral, something that could not be bought and sold. ; ; K A R O W In 1956, months after Pollock s death in a car crash, Allan Kaprow (1927 2006), a painter teaching at Rutgers iversity in New Brunswick, New Jersey, published an article in Art News entitled The egacy of Jackson Pollock. He described how Pollock s action paintings, often because of their scale and the fact that some contained real objects, had started to become environmental. The next step, he claimed, was to make environmental art Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, ALLAN U 6 A RT I V 104 THE M O D ER N W O R L D if need be, the vastness of orty-second Street. Kaprow knew Rauschenberg s work (he was awed by the White Paintings), and this pronouncement about incorporating everyday life into art sounds like a description of the Texan s combines. In 1958, Kaprow began to make what he called environments, constructed installations that a viewer can enter. His most famous environment, Yard (fig. 29.11), came in 1961. illed mostly with used tires, the work had the allover look and energy of a Pollock painting, but visitors to the town-house garden where it was installed were expected to walk through it, experiencing it physically, including its smell. ike Rauschenberg in his combines, Kaprow attached no firm meaning to his works, although the discarded synthetic materials suggest a modern industrial urban environment, as well as a sense of waste, even death. To learn how to add sound to his environments, Kaprow sat in on John Cage s music composition course at the New School for Social Research, a class filled with artists not musicians almost all of whom went on to become famous. Music was made by chance and generally without traditional instruments. A typical exercise would be to compose a piece with radios and use a method governed by chance, such as the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese system of divination based on random number-generation procedures, to determine when and by whom each radio would be turned on and off and the length of the piece. The class inspired Kaprow to add the live human figure to his environments, which, unlike Yard, initially were made of a variety of collaged nonart materials that ran from floor to ceiling, vaguely resembling a Rauschenberg combine. He unveiled the result to the New York art world in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. sing polyfilm walls, Kaprow divided his U genre, which he prefers to call Theater Pieces, is Robert Whitman (b. 1935), a student of Kaprow s at Rutgers and also another vagabond in Cage s famous New School composition class. In 1960, he presented American Moon at the Reuben Gallery. The set was made up largely of paper, cardboard and polyfilm, yet these banal materials were leant a poetic beauty by the strange, nonnarrative actions of the performers, which occurred at a lyrical pace. All of these elements common materials, poetic imagery, and lyrical pacing would characterize his work, defying interpretation while evoking a broad range of responses. (To view the performance and a documentary film on this and other Theater Pieces, see www.myartslab.com.) If Kaprow s performance pieces were prosaic, mundane, and very down-to-earth, Whitman s were abstract and dreamlike, garnering him a reputation with art historians as the master of the medium and one of its most innovative practitioners. Whitman thought of his Theater Pieces as one continuous image that unfolds in space and time. Abandoning words, he took the most mundane objects, such as a candle, piece of fruit, or lightbulb, and over time, using light, color, movement, and pacing, transformed it into something magical and mysterious. An especially radical feature of American Moon was film projection, which he used in many of his performances, as seen in Prune Flat (fig. 29.12) of 1965, where film, shadow, and the real-life performers are hauntingly juxtaposed, creating multiple layers of imagery and an oneiric sense of mystery. Whitman s use of film, which he also used in 1964 installations he called Cinema Pieces, were made before the advent of video, and anticipated the Video Art and installations of later decades. 29.11 Allan Kaprow, Yard. 1961. Environment of used tires, tar paper, and barrels, as installed at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, life-size. Destroyed. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (980063) collaged environment into three rooms, in which seated spectators watched, listened, and smelled as performers carried out such tasks as painting (Rauschenberg and Johns participated), playing records, squeezing orange juice, and speaking fragments of sentences, all determined by chance. In a sense, the work was like a Rauschenberg combine that took place in time and space and with human activity. Because of the title of Kaprow s innovative work, a Happening became the term for this new visual art form, in which many of the major artists of the day, including Rauschenberg, started working. While many artists accepted this term, others used different labels, all of which can be grouped under the umbrella term Performance Art, which is distinguished from theater in that it takes place in an art context. W H I T M A N 18 Happenings unleashed a flurry of Happenings, or Performance Art, which lasted through the mid-1960s. Soon-to-be-famous artists like Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Morris, and Red Grooms along with Rauschenberg created works. The artist who has dedicated his life to the Also in John Cage s class with Kaprow in 1958 was another unregistered student, George Brecht (1926 2009), who for a class assignment wrote a composition for automobiles entitled Motor Vehicle Sunset Event. For this work, participants drew cards with instructions and at sundown in a city parking lot they revved engines, honked horns, rolled down windows, slammed doors shut, and opened and closed hoods and trunks. Brecht began typing up this and other Events, as he called GEORGE BRECHT (Item not available in eText) ROBERT 29.12 Robert Whitman, Prune Flat. 1965. As performed in 1976. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1047 these compositions, on white cards and mailing them to ac uaintances, an act that initiated an art form that came to be called Mail iversity art teacher Robert Art. (Brecht s good friend, Rutgers Watts, began designing art stamps to mail their Event cards, thus inventing Stamp Art.) By 1960, Brecht s Events had become uite minimal. Three Aq e s vents, printed on a roughly 2-by-3-inch card, consisted of the title and under it three bulleted words water, ice, and steam People receiving the card in the mail could respond in any way they wanted they could even frame the card. Allan Kaprow, for example, thought of making iced tea. What is the work of art in Three q e s vents The idea The card itself The execution of the piece And who is actually the artist in this work that allows the recipient to be the creator Brecht was posing the classic Duchampian uestions while simultaneously integrating art into daily life and taking it off the aesthetic and intellectual pedestal reserved for high art. By 1962, Brecht s example had helped spawn a New York-based international art movement called luxus, similarly dedicated to making a conceptual art that violated the conventional distinctions between art and life, artist and nonartist, museum and street, and which included Performance Art as a major component. One of the group s most famous works is Brecht s rip M si (1959 , which was executed by having the performer mount a stepladder and pour water at varying rates and intervals into a bowl on the floor. u ou E A u ou E ? ? ? ? ? D GEORGE SE uc ) G A L iving down the road from Kaprow in rural New Jersey was George Segal (1924 2000), who responded to his friend s environments and Happenings by creating representational, not abstract, environments out of real objects and populated by plaster figures, as in The Gas tati n (fig. 29.13) of 1963. Now, the performers are frozen, reduced to ghost-white manne uins. To create them, Segal used real people, making castings of them by using plaster medical bandages. ike Rauschenberg and Kaprow, he was breaking down the barrier between art and life. But his art is far from neutral it is emotional and makes a statement. Segal s work highlights the alienation he perceived in contemporary life. This alienation can be seen in his figures, which are left white, as though drained of life. Generally they are lethargic, exhausted, and alone, and seem trapped by a harsh geometry of the horizontals and verticals of their setting. The works even contain symbols used in more traditional art. Gas tati n, for example, is dominated by a Bulova clock, a e ent ri ( reminder of death ) motif, which floats in a 10foot expanse of darkness. Its shape mysteriously resonates with the tire on the floor. The vending machine, tires, cans of highperformance oil, and the gas station itself suggest modernity, technology, and fast, efficient living. Missing from this materiality, however, is something meaningful human interaction and spirituality. Segal retains the existential angst of his Abstract Expressionist background by uestioning the meaning of modern existence. Although he often used contemporary branded objects, such as Coke bottles, to give his environments the look of reality and modernity, Segal never celebrated the products of consumer culture, nor uestioned how mass-media imagery, including advertising, manipulates its audience. His sculpture is closer in spirit and style to the paintings of Edward Hopper (see fig. 28.53) than to Pop Art, with which he has been mistakenly associated. o o m m o mo 29.13 George Segal, The Gas tati n. 1963. Plaster figures, Coca-Cola machine, Coca-Cola bottles, wooden Coca-Cola crates, metal stand, rubber tires, tire rack, oil cans, electric clock, concrete blocks, windows of wood and plate glass, 8'6" * 24' * 4' (2.59 * 7.32 * 1.22 m). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 8 A RT I V 104 THE O D ER N W O R L D Pop Art: Consumer Culture as Subject Pop Art is a style that emerged in New York in the early 1960s, although it had appeared in a very different guise and with less fanfare in Britain a decade earlier this incarnation had no impact on the development of American Pop. The style got its name because it derives its imagery from popular or vernacular culture. Like Rauschenberg and aprow, Pop artists re-presented the artifacts of the world they lived in, namely the imagery of the mass media, although they did it using conventional painting rather than new mediums. like Johns and Segal, both of whom occasionally used popular imagery, Pop artists focused on the products of popular culture by taking what art historians often describe as a low art form, that is commercial art, and incorporating it into one that is considered high, meaning fine art. By doing so, however, they subversively revealed the manipulative impact of the mass media. Among the best-known Pop artists are the Americans Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, as well as the British collagist and painter Richard Hamilton. Although not labeled a Pop artist, the erman Sigmar Polke similarly appropriated imagery from mass culture as he not only critiqued that culture but also explored the meaning and language of art. Another close friend of aprow s was Roy Lichtenstein (1923 1997), who was hired in 1960 to teach iversity. When he arrived he was an painting at Rutgers Abstract Expressionist painter. Within a year, however, he was making what would be considered Pop paintings, in part influenced by aprow s dictum to make art that did not look like art. (See Primary Source, page 1050.) The contemporary life that Lichtenstein scavenged and represented was not the urban streets, as was the case with aprow, Rauschenberg, and Segal, but the crude black-and-white advertisements in telephone books and newspapers and the prosaic drawings in comic books. These he cropped and adjusted into visually riveting images, such as Drowning Girl (fig. 29.14). Traditionally, Lichtenstein is appreciated for seeing the beauty of low art and elevating it to high art, in effect celebrating popular culture, and in particular American culture. When first shown, however, his paintings were so radical they were thought hideous and were not even considered art by many. After all, they looked like images from comic books. urthermore, art, and particularly Modernist art, was supposed to move art forward, investigating new aspects of abstraction. High art was not supposed to look like low art, and it was not supposed to be representational. Lichtenstein s work does more than just blur the distinctions between fine art and mass culture. Like Johns, whose Flag paintings had a profound impact on him, Lichtenstein was interested in the language of art, particularly in regard to issues of perception. He does not just imitate the comic strip, he also plays with that genre s technique of making an image out of benday dots, the small dots that when massed together create color and shading in ROY LICHTENSTEIN +-.1/ Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl. 1963. Oil on canvas, 5'71*7" + 5'6 * " (1.72 + 1.69 m). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Philip Johnson <und and =ift of Mr. and Mrs. Bagley Wright 3 4 printed material. He was intrigued by how an illusion of threedimensional volume could be made using flat dots and flat black lines. When viewed from close up, Lichtenstein s large images dissolve into flat abstract patterns, virtually becoming Abstract Expressionist compositions. Lichtenstein did not randomly select his sources or select them just for aesthetic purposes, for the images that he used for his paintings from 1961 to 1964 tend to fall into a distinct pattern: Men are portrayed as strong, virile soldiers and fighter pilots, whereas women are shown as emotionally distraught, dependent on men, and happily slaving around the house doing domestic chores. With deadpan brilliance, Lichtenstein made his paintings a mirror of contemporary society, revealing the stereotyping deeply embedded in the media. But the paintings themselves appear objective and unemotional, giving little suggestion of a polemical agenda or a sense of the artist s presence, whether his hand (brushwork) or emotions. Andy Warhol (1928 1987) was making art based on comic books at exactly the same time as Lichtenstein. When the dealer Leo Castelli decided to represent Lichtenstein and not him, Warhol turned to other kinds of popular imagery, namely product design and newspaper photographs. Warhol was from Pittsburgh, and in the 1950s in New York he established himself as a successful illustrator of women s shoes, learning first ANDY WARHOL CH!"T#R 29 "O$T%!R TO "O$T&O'#R(, 1 945 1 9* 0 1049 PRIMARY SOURCE Qoy Xichtenstein (1923 1997) From an interview witY Zoan Marter In this 1996 interview with the art historian Joan Marter, Roy Lichtenstein talks about the enormous impact Allan Kaprow s environments and New York happenings had on the development of his Pop Art. JOAN MARTER: In one of your interviews, you say that although I feel that what I am doing almost has nothing to do with Environments, there is a kernel of thought in Happenings that is interesting to me. Can you comment? ROY LICHTENSTEIN: Well, there s more than a kernel of thought in Happenings that is interesting to me. Many of them tended to have American objects rather than School of Paris objects. I m thinking of the tires, and the kind of advertising sort of things in [Claes] Oldenburg s and [Jim] Dine s Happenings. They were like an American street, maybe from Pollock in a certain way. The Environments are like expanded Pollocks; they are allover in the same kind of sense. If I look at Pollock now, I think they re really beautiful; I don t get all of the gutsy stuff the cigarette butts and house paint, and everything they re made out of. They had a big hand the deceiving and manipulative role of advertising and product packaging. He was also fascinated by the impact of the mass media on public opinion. Among his most famous works and among the first he made after abandoning cartoon imagery is the ). He first that he mass-produced, Campbell s Soup Cans (fig. >@BIJ influence on Happenings. Because the Environment would envelop you the way that we thought that Pollock s paintings enveloped you they were big and seemed to have no end. They were allover, all of that. Some of that, I think, went into Environments, which were kind of a background for Happenings. But the thing that probably had the most influence on me was the American rather than the French objects. JM: Do you remember anything specifically [about Allan Kaprow s work] that interested you? RL: The tires he did [Yard at the Martha Jackson Gallery, 1961; see fig. 29.11]. Also other things with strips of paper and things written on them [Words, at the Smolin Gallery, 1962]. I think the thing I most got from him was this kind of statement about it doesn t have to look like art, or how much of what you do is there only because it looks like art. You always thought artists should be original, whatever it was. I was doing Abstract Expressionism very late, 1961, and much of that was because it looked like art to me. I was amazed at how much he [Kaprow] actually liked [my Look Mickey and the other first Pop paintings]. Most people hated it at first. [ g \v [ ] Source: Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957 1963, ed. oan Marter (N : Rut ers ni ersity ress, 1999) painted 32 Campbell s soup can images for his first exhibition, in 1962, at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which at the time had a burgeoning contemporary art scene. The Campbell company then offered 32 varieties of canned soup, hence 32 paintings, which Warhol hand-painted. Warhol installed the works as ^ Andy Warhol, 29.1 Campbell s Soup Cans. 1961 64. Acrylic on canvas, 32 works, each 20 * 16" (50.8 * 40.6 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Irving Blum; Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest, gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Buirden, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Foundation 1050 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D monotonously as possible, evenly spacing them and placing them on a shelf, as soup cans would be presented in a supermarket. (In r , are our illustration, the works, some later and arranged in a grid.) Just as the soup came off a mass-production assembly line, Warhol, soon after his Ferus Gallery exhibition, began mass-producing his paintings in his studio, which he called the Factory. Assistants made the works to his specifications, using a silkscreen process to print a photographic image of a soup can onto canvas, or onto paper, as he did to make prints. (For a more extensive discussion of this process as well as of his portrait of Marilyn Monroe, see the Introduction, pages xxi and xxvi.) Although a workaholic and highly involved with the production of his art, Warhol gave the public the illusion that he barely touched his own paintings and prints, just signing them on the back. With this Duchampian gesture, Warhol tells us that paintings are commodities, that people are buying a name product that is, a Warhol and that art is about ideas, not necessarily about technique or craftsmanship. But Warhol is also commenting on the camouflaging function of product design, how it tells us nothing about the mass-produced product it promotes and how the packaging lures us into buying it. Warhol s art underscores how Campbell s soup is everywhere, having penetrated the farthest reaches of the country, and that mass production, uniformity, and consumerism dominate American society. In effect, his p ans are a portrait of America. Like Lichtenstein, Warhol neither praises nor condemns. s_lks` eebed fjp r While Pop Art emerged in America in the early 1960s, it had already appeared in London in the mid-1950s. Protesting the conservatism of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which largely promoted prewar painters and sculptors, a handful of artists formed the Independent Group, dedicated to bringing contemporary life into contemporary art. The war had left Britain commercially weak and with few creature comforts. Thus, the British were more than ready to appreciate the celebrity promotion and advertisements for appliances, cars, and homes that they found in the American magazines that flooded London. Well before their American counterparts, the British were fascinated by the technology and consumerism they saw taking over American society. The Independent Group, led by artists Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) and Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 2005) and critic Lawrence Alloway (1926 1990), embraced American mass culture and celebrated it in their art. Using the photomontage technique developed by the Berlin Dadaists (see page 988), Richard Hamilton cut images from comic books and body-building and pinup magazines, as seen in his st What s t That Ma es T day s H es i erent ppealing (fig. 2 16) of 1956. Sprinkled around the room depicted in this small collage are the latest hi-tech commodities: a tape recorder, television, and Space Age vacuum cleaner. A Ford logo decorates a lampshade, while a can of ham sits on a coffee table as though it were a sculpture. The weightlifter carries a lollipop inscribed with the word pop, a term coined by Alloway, announcing that this is Pop Art. Sex permeates the image as Hamilton exposes, and perhaps even celebrates, the powerful role sexual innuendo plays in advertising. T H E I M P A C T O F P O P A R T I N G E R M A N Y During the 1960s and 1970s, the art world was focused so heavily on New York that other art centers, especially those in Europe, were all but ignored. Artists in sseldorf were producing some of the most important work of the period, yet only Joseph Beuys, whom we shall meet later in this chapter, was well known internationally. It was not until the mid-1980s that the New York art world discovered Sigmar Polke (b. 1941) and Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), two East German transplants, who toward 1963 cultivated a kind of German Pop Art. Polke and Richter were heavily influenced by the combines of Robert Rauschenberg and by Pop Art, especially the works of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, which they knew from magazines. They were also well versed in the Dada antiart movement, since the first postwar Dada exhibition took place in sseldorf in 1958, and they were mesmerized by Fluxus, the group that like Dada rejected high art and was dedicated to transforming life into art. Fluxus literally came to D sseldorf in 1963 when the group presented a festival of performances, Festum Fluxorum. Combined with these artistic forces was the impact of the economic miracle of the Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program) in Germany, BRITISH POP {{ | j j} fj ~ fj xp 29.1 Richard Hamilton, st What s t That Maes Tday s Hes ierent ppealing 1956. Collage on paper, 10 * + 9 * " (26 + 24.8 cm). Kunsthalle Tübingen. Sammlung undel, Germany 1 CHAP TER 29 4 3 4 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1051 (Item not available in eText) 29.17 Sigmar Polke, Alice in Wonderland. 1971. Mixed media on fabric strips, 10'6" + 8'63*4" (3.2 + 1.6 m). Private collection, Cologne which by 1963 brought about a stable economy and a degree of consumerism. As a result, Polke and Richter, to varying degrees, were preoccupied with mass-media imagery, commodity culture, and analyzing art, revealing how it functions and takes on meaning. For a brief period they called their art Capitalist Realism, a pun on Socialist Realism, the official representational propaganda 1052 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D art of East Germany and the rest of the Soviet Union. Richter, in his paintings, largely focused on appropriating photographs, both mass-media and family, using a blurry presentation to undermine the reality of the image and turn it into a fictitious haze, thus revealing the artifice of painting and suggesting the ambiguity of the meaning of the original photograph. Polke s work was more varied at this time; throughout his career, the look of his work and the issues he has dealt with have changed constantly. In the 1960s, he made countless drawings, often based on images in magazines and advertising, showing common products. He used a range of styles, such as a slick deadened illustrational look and a crude cartoony style. He also often used nonart materials, such as blue ballpoint pen on notebook paper. These works were a rejection of the refinement of the highart tradition, and at the same time they were quite cynical, not only toward artistic values but also the mass media and how it transformed commercial products into appealing objects: The objects in Polke s drawings weren t appealing. Polke also made drawings and paintings using Raster dots, the small dots used in commercial printing. He blew up the original magazine photograph so large the image became a fascinating grid of dots. In a 1966 painting entitled Bunnies a re-presentation of a magazine photograph of bunnygirls at a Playboy club (here the commodity is sex), the original image became a pixilated blur, the bunnies reduced to vibrating dots of different shades of black and gray and just barely visible. In Bunnies, Polke exposes the artificiality of image making, revealing how the original magazine photo was not reality but just an image consisting of dots. Before the decade was out, Polke was creating art on a wide range of surfaces and with a wide range of materials, as suggested by Alice in Wonderland (fig. 29.17) of 1971, which is paint printed on store-bought printed fabric, not canvas. One fabric is covered with soccer players and the other with polka dots, the latter a visual pun on the artist s name but also a reference to his use of Raster dots, and thus the media. Like Warhol, Polke printed appropriated images on his fabric a ghost-white image of a basketball player, pirated from a magazine, and the caterpillar with a hookah and Alice biting into a mushroom, taken from the illustrations by Sir John Tenniel for Lewis Carol s 1865 Alice in Wonderland. Difficult to see in reproductions are the appropriated 1950s-style outlines of the heads of a man and woman, handstamped several times in red and yellow. Polke bombards us with a variety of pilfered images, images executed in a range of styles and from many different periods. In effect, he is telling us that we both see and know the world through images, and that this pictorial world becomes the real world, our reality. Supposedly, the painting was inspired by watching sports on television while under the influence of drugs, the theme of hallucination being suggested by the caterpillar s hookah and Alice s mushroom. If this is the case, we can add portraying the experience of sensory perception to the long list of issues we find in this painting. Another issue is how context structures meaning. Polke demonstrates this by layering his motifs, for the narrative of his scavenged images would change if they were juxtaposed differently. Ultimately, it is virtually impossible to attach a fixed meaning to Alice in Wonderland, allowing us to assume that Polke sees art, and images in general, as not having fixed meanings only interpretations depending on context and who is doing the interpreting. Ultimately, Polke and Richter did not consider their art Pop Art, and despite Polke re-presenting media images, as did Warhol and Lichtenstein, there is no mistaking his art for theirs. In his work, there is no sense of fun or light humor and no sense of celebrating low art, even if the Americans were actually being subversively ironic in their celebration. To the contrary, his paintings and drawings often have a sense of parody, or as seen in Alice in Wonderland, and a sense of loss or sadness, as evoked by the ghostlike figures, the chaos of the imagery, and the emptiness of the television snow of polka dots. Instead of seeming objective and unemotional, his art appears subjective and emotional. As we shall see in the next chapter, Polka s art, heavily influenced by Pop, anticipated many of the fundamental issues of Postmodernism, and his layering of imagery and interest in how images and art function and take on meaning would prove quite influential. FORMALIST ABSTRACTION OF THE 1950s AND 1960s The most influential art critic in the United States in the 1940s and well into the 1960s was Clement Greenberg, who wrote art reviews for The Nation and The Partisan Review. He began by championing Pollock s formalism, but as the 1940s progressed he increasingly promoted an art that was totally abstract and nonreferential and dealt with just those qualities inherent to the medium, that is color, texture, shape of field, and composition. Such work, which emphasized the formalist or abstract qualities of the medium, could make no reference beyond itself. Greenberg s theories had an enormous impact on the way painters, sculptors, and other critics thought about art. His criticism helped lay a foundation for the Post-Painterly painting and Minimalist Art of the 1950s and 1960s. Formalist Painting Formalist painting emerged in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, the early 1950s, and in large part as a reaction to it. Just as Rauschenberg, Johns, aprow, and the Pop artists rejected the subjective components of Pollock and de ooning, the formalist painters sought to make unemotional art. They replaced bold, gestural brushwork with smooth surfaces that gave no hint of the artist s hand or feelings. Instead of the push-pull of Cubist space of de ooning s style of Abstract Expressionism, they powerfully asserted the flatness of the canvas, virtually eliminating any sense of space. Led by Greenberg, they were attracted to the formalist implications of Abstract Expressionism, not its emotional content. They also embraced the style s enormous scale. Among the formalist styles of the period are Post-Painterly Abstraction, Hard-Edge Abstraction, and Minimalism. F R A N K E N T H A L E R Greenberg championed Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928) as one of the new formalists. Frankenthaler was inspired by Jackson Pollock, who, toward 1950, in an attempt to expand his art beyond drip paintings, began working on unprimed canvases, using just black enamel paint and allowing HELEN CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1053 29.18 Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea 1952. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 23*4" + 9 81*4" (2.2 + 2.95 m). Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. (on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) it to seep into the fabric, creating a smooth surface. Frankenthaler built on the implications of this technique. In a breakthrough work of 1952, Mountains and Sea (fig. 29.18), she developed stain painting. Frankenthaler had just returned from Nova cotia, and using charcoal on unprimed canvas, she quickly laid in a composition suggesting landscape. Working like Pollock, she put her canvas on the floor. he then poured thin oil paint on it, tilting it to allow the paint to run, drawing and painting by changing the angled tilt of the canvas rather than using a brush. The thin oil bled into the canvas, becoming one with it and having the translucency of watercolor. Greenberg admired the picture s flatness and the fact that the paint was not tactile, a three-dimensional quality 29.19 Ellsworth elly, ed Bue reen. 1963. Oil on canvas, 8" + 114" (2.34 + 3.45 m). Museum of Contemporary Art, an Diego, La Jolla, CA. Gift of Jack and Carolyn Farris 1054 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D that he felt would result in the illusion of space. He declared you could not sense the artist s hand, and thus her presence, and praised the picture s nonreferential decorativeness as opposed ualities. While Pollock first used to its expressionistic unprimed canvas, it was rankenthaler s example of thin translucent oils that spawned in the 1950s and 1960s legions of stain painters, of whom the best known are the Washington Color School painters. like rankenthaler, however, her followers work was entirely abstract. Greenberg s personal infatuation with rankenthaler apparently blinded him to the Abstract Expressionist side of her work. ike her many followers, she is now often labeled a PostPainterly Abstractionist, a term that refers to the smooth nongestural nature of this kind of abstraction, but in the 1950s and 1960s she was generally considered a second-generation Abstract Expressionist. As the title implies, M untains and Sea reflects her experience of the Nova Scotia landscape. The energy of the curving, explosive composition seems to embody the sublime force of nature, while the soft translucent colors and white unprimed canvas evoke the brilliant glare of sunlight. Although essentially abstract, the picture is filled with references, which is generally true of her work up to the present day. ¡¢ £ ¤ ¥ E L L Y In contrast, there are no references whatsoever to be found in the abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923). Kelly developed a distinctly American brand of formalist painting in Paris from 1948 to 1954. During these years, he began to reduce painting to a barebones simplicity, which some critics called HardEdge Abstraction. To free his mind from earlier art, he based his abstractions on shapes he saw in the world around him, especially negative spaces, such as the opening under a bridge, a shadow, or a window. His paintings use just a handful of geometric shapes in ELLSWORTH solid primary and secondary colors to explore how forms move through space, how colors interact, and how figure relates to ground, that is, how image relates to background. Kelly generally locks his figure and ground so tightly into a single unit they seem to coexist on the same spatial plane. In ed lue Green (fig. 29.19), a 1963 work, Kelly plays a red rectangle and a blue curved shape off a green ground. The left side of the painting appears fixed, whereas the right has movement. When standing in front of this enormous work, which is more than 11 feet wide, a viewer can feel at one moment the green ground consuming the blue and at the next moment the blue plunging down into the green. In other words, the figure ground relationship is reversed. But never to be forgotten is the sheer intensity of the color, especially as presented on such a large scale. Kelly s genius is the simplicity of his gesture He stripped everything else away, including any sense of himself, to make a painting that is about color in this case red, blue, and green and movement. ¦ § ¨ © RAN¥ S T E L L A Just as Kelly was returning from Europe, a young rank Stella (b. 1936) began his studies at Princeton iversity, opting for an art education at a university rather than an art school, which became commonplace after the war. Within a year of graduating, he was in New York and the talk of the town because of his Black Paintings, included in a 1959 Museum of eri ans. These were total Modern Art exhibition called Si teen abstractions consisting of black parallel bands created by allowing white pinstripe lines of canvas to show through. He soon began working in color, as in press ndia (fig. 29.20) of 1965, and on an enormous scale, here over 18 feet across. Inspired by the inherent flatness of Johns s Flag paintings (fig. 29.10), Stella made entirely flat works as well. ¡¢ ª ®¬ «¬ ¤¯ ° ÄÅÆÄ0 Çrank Stella, ÈÉpress ÊË Ìndia. 1965. Metallic powder in polymer emulsion on canvas, 6'5" * 18'8" (1.96 * 5.69 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of S. I. Newhouse, Jr. ±²³´µ¶· ¸¹ ´º»µ¼³· µº ´º»µ½º¾¶·¿À 1 ¹ÁÂ 1 ¹Ã 0 1055 RCE Frank Stella (b. 1936) SO Pratt Institute Lecture Ð Ï PRIMAR In 1959, Stella gave a lecture to students at New York s Pratt Institute in which he discussed his paintings then being shown in the Museum of Modern Art s Sixteen Americans exhibition. He specifically addressed what he saw as one of the most pressing formalist issues facing painters at the time: how to make a composition that was not about the relationship of its parts. various parts with and against each other. The obvious answer was symmetry make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration placed on an open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at and there are probably quite a few, although I know of only one other, color density forces illusionistic space out of the painting at a constant rate by using a regulated pattern. The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application which followed and complemented the design solution. This was done by using the house painter s technique and tools. T here were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other methodological. In the first case, I had to do something about relational painting, i.e., the balancing of the There is no figure ground relationship in Empress of India, and no push-pull of Cubist and Abstract Expressionist space. In fact, there is no hierarchy to the composition, which is determined by the -shape of each of the four canvases that have been butted together. Stella said of his work, What you see is what you see. In other words, the painting has nothing that you do not see no hidden meanings, symbols, or references. Despite giving his work suggestive titles such as Empress of India, Stella wanted his canvases viewed simply as objects with an independent life of their own, free from associations. (See Primary Source, above.) Fellow artists and critics evaluated this kind of abstract art on its ability to invent new formalist devices (for example, Stella s ability to create perfectly flat, spaceless painting or the innovative shapes of his canvases). However, the power of such work lies in the sheer force of its scale and dramatic sense of movement as the s change direction to create new lines of movement. Because Stella used a stripped-down artistic vocabulary and often determined his compositions using a geometric premise, critics often describe his paintings from this period as Minimal Art. Í Í Formalist Sculpture: Minimal Art A group of sculptors emerged in the early 1960s who generally composed their work using a mathematical or conceptual premise, paralleling in sculpture what Stella was doing in painting. Their reliance upon geometry in this new work emphasized conceptual rather than emotional content, and it favored the means and materials of mass production. Their sculpture came to be known as Minimal art. Artists often avoided making the objects themselves, preferring to send specifications to an artisan, or more likely a factory, for production. Like Pop paintings, Minimal 29.21 Donald Judd, Untitled. 1969. Copper, ten units, 9 * 40 * 31" (22.8 * 101.6 * 78.7 cm) each, with 9" (22.8 cm) intervals 170 * 40 * 31" (432 * 101.6 * 106.7 cm) overall. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Panza Collection. 91.37.13 Î Ñ 10 6 PA RT I Ò T H E M O D ER N ÓORLD Source: Pratt Institute Lecture, 1959 sculpture lacks the evidence of the artist s touch that traditionally served as the sign of personal emotion and expression as well as proof of the artist s technical accomplishment. There is no sign of the artist at all. urthermore, the artists used unconventional nonart materials to make art Plexiglas, fluorescent tubes, galvanized steel, magnesium tiles continuing the exploration of new materials that characterized so much of the art making of the late 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, one of their concerns was to make art that did not look like art. Like Stella, they wanted their artworks to be perceived as independent objects, having no reference to things beyond themselves. Ô The characteristics of Minimalism are apparent in ntitle , a 1969 sculpture of copper boxes fig. 29.21 by Donald Judd 1928 1994 . The sculptor determined the shape and spacing of the boxes by mathematical premise each box is 9-by40-by- 1 inches, with 9 inches between boxes , not by intuition or artistic sensitivity, as David Smith, for example, operated see fig. 29.5 . Like Stella s paintings, Judd s work was constructed by serial repetition of elements so there is no hierarchy of composition and no evocation of emotion. A viewer can take in and readily understand his composition at a glance. Judd described his sculpture as a specific object, meaning it was a real object that had no references beyond itself. Viewers were to admire it for its scale, color, texture, and proportions, for example. In addition to possessing the properties of a well-made real thing, Judd s boxes occupy space like ordinary things as well. They are not presented on a base, and there is no glass case DONALD JUDD Õ Ù Ø Ö × Ø × × Ø Ø × to protect them. By relinquishing the props that announce an object to be a work of art, Minimalism heightens our awareness of the spaces in which we view art. In other words, the space around the object becomes an integral part of the work and of the art experience. The Minimalist whose work was perhaps most severely limited to mathematical formulas is the light sculptor Dan lavin 19 1996 , renowned for working with common fluorescent tubes, which he used to sculpt with colored and white light. lavin s tubes were store-bought and came in 2-, 4-, 6-, and 8-foot lengths. Although difficult to tell from reproductions, lavin s deceivingly simple works are spectacularly beautiful, even when they use just white light, as in the nominal three to illiam o c ham fig. 29.22 . The magical quality of the light as it radiates through the surrounding space is mesmerizing, even calming, often projecting a Classical serenity. or some viewers, it even embodies spirituality. The work, however, is strictly formalist and is determined by geometric premises, here a progression from one to two to three lights. No references are intended, despite the suggestion of the title, which lavin attached upon finishing the work. lavin s sculpture is often extremely simple, consisting of a single tube of white or colored light, sometimes placed vertically on the wall and sitting on the floor, other times coming off a corner along a wall at a 45-degree angle. With Minimalism, art round Zero. Reduced to bare essentials, it seeme to reached have no place left to go. DAN FLAVIN Ô × ÙÙ Ø Ô Ô × Ú Û Ø ÜÝ Þ ß Ô Ô Ô à Ö â 29.22 Dan lavin. the nominal three to illiam o c ham 196 . luorescent light fixtures with daylight lamps, each 6 .8 m Solomon R. uggenheim Museum, New York. Panza Collection. 91. 698 â CHAP TER 29 ã ä å æ ç èé ê ë ìí ê îï ð ê P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1057 THE P ñò RA ñó ST 19 ô 0S õ POST ö M ó N ó MA ñó SM The cold objectivity of Minimalism and formalist abstraction dominated contemporary art in the mid-1960s and into the 1970s, overshadowing styles that focused on subjectivity and the human figure. Even Pop Art seemed unemotional and machine-made. But as the 1960s developed, so did an interest in an art based on emotion, the human being, and referential and representational subject matter. In the midst of the Vietnam War and the civil rights-led social revolution that challenged the status quo, artists began to view formalist abstraction as an escapist indulgence. With Minimalism, many artists felt that the Modernist avantgarde had completely lost touch with society, retreating into a hermetic world of its own. By the mid-1960s, artists could no longer remain removed from their emotions and the hotly contested social and political issues of the day. By the late 1960s, American artists began to put the human component back into art, and many addressed the issues tearing the nation apart. The responses were diverse, with artists using what seems like an endless array of mediums to deal with an endless array of issues. Now, many artists made art that was temporary or conceptual and could not be collected, in effect dematerializing the art object and reflecting the antimaterialist stance of the 1960s social revolution. (See The Art Historian s Lens, page 1059). Artists themselves became quite political as they attacked the bastions of white male art, museums and commercial galleries. Women, African Americans, Latinos, American Indians, and Asian Americans vociferously protested their exclusion from the art world by picketing museums and denouncing the prejudices of those organizations. More important, they began making art that dealt with issues that museum curators and directors did not consider mainstream or valid aesthetic concerns issues such as gender, ethnic and racial identity, as well as sexual orientation. Disenfranchised artists, like the Impressionists 100 years earlier, began opening their own galleries to provide an alternative to museums. Because the pluralism of the 1970s came on the heels of Minimalism, and in many respects is a response to its hermetic aesthetics, the art from this decade is often called Post-Minimalism. she was raised in New York after her Jewish parents fled Nazi persecution. Hesse worked with a variety of unusual materials, such as acrylic paint on papier-mâché slathered over balloons. Her sculptures were abstract and had a basis in geometry. But because they reveal the dripping, pooling, flowing, stretching, and drying by which they took shape, they also suggest organic forms and processes, and growth and sexuality. In 1968, she began using fiberglass, which became her trademark material and was perhaps responsible for her brain cancer. A classic work is Untitled (fig. 29.23), which has as its starting point the geometric form of Minimalism. The four rectangular units of which it is composed imply boxes or framed paintings because of their curled edges. Contradicting their geometry are the uneven rippling surfaces and sides, which transform the fiberglass into an organic substance, especially recalling skin. The strange ropelike latex appendages eccentrically flopping from either side of center suggest arms or legs, momentarily transforming the boxes or frames into a family of individuals. Ultimately, these appendages are nothing more than abstract elements, like the rectangular units. The work is full of contradictions: It is simultaneously funny and morbid, geometric and organic, erotic and repulsive, abstract and referential. (See www.myartslab.com.) Perhaps the most powerful quality in Hesse s sculptures is the sense of frailty, wear, decay, and aging best expressed in Untitled by the wobbly legs. Emerging at the same time was sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1939), who befriended Hesse. He explored the properties of sculpture in a series of works that included making , in which the creative act itself was the art, such as RICHARD SERRA ÷øùúûýý þøÿ Post-Minimal Sculpture: Geometry and Emotion Some of the first Post-Minimal sculptors retained the geometry of Minimalism, but they were hardly creating insular, discreet objects. To the contrary, their geometric forms were loaded with powerful emotional issues. One of the outstanding Post-Minimalists in the 1960s was Eva Hesse (1936 1970). Her accomplishment is astonishing when one considers that her career was cut short when she died of a brain tumor at age 34. Born in Hamburg, Germany, EVA HESSE 1058 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 29.23 Eva Hesse, Untitled. 1970. Fiberglass over wire mesh, latex over cloth and wire (four units), 7'67*8" + 12'35*8" + 3'61*2" (2.31 + 3.75 + 1.08 m), overall. Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA. Purchased with Funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust, Nathan Emory Coffin, Collection of the Des Moines Art Center, 1988 (1988.b.a-d) B y the 1970s, art historians and critics were talking about the toward 1960 (see page 1046). Yvonne Rainer and Robert Whitman, for dematerialization of the art object in contemporary art. By this, example, had a wide following and strongly influenced art in the they meant that art was no longer exclusively an object. Art was also 1960s, but today they are largely forgotten. Their work was per- something that could not be bought and sold, something so tempo- formed, sometimes once, sometimes for several weeks, and then it rary that it could be seen only for a brief time, making it difficult for disappeared. During the 1960s, Whitman, especially, had tremendous scholars and critics to study, analyze, and write about it. Artists were visibility. His integration of film projection into his Performance Pieces now making temporary sculpture out of crumpled paper, bread placed (see fig. 29.12) was startlingly innovative, anticipating the video instal- on the mouth of a volcano, or patterns made in the snow. Many of the lations that would become popular in the 1980s (see page 1047). Like artists making temporary art photographed their work. The photo- his performances, Whitman s installations disappeared when they graphs became works of art in themselves and allowed scholars to were dismantled and put into storage, where they cannot be seen, study the artists output. unlike conventional paintings or sculptures. Today, his Theater Pieces A handful of artists worked almost entirely in temporary mediums are occasionally performed, and one work, Prune Flat, has been and left no record in photographs, films, or drawings. Not surprisingly, acquired by a museum, the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, which their careers along with their contributions and accomplishments are owns the score, the detailed drawings for costumes, and instructions today underrecognized, if not virtually lost to art historians. Perhaps for performance. THE ART HISTORIAN S LENS Studying the Absent Object the most vulnerable artists were the performance artists who emerged throwing molten lead at the spot where floor and wall meet, a kind of Jackson Pollock action sculpture that resulted in a violent, energetic splattering on wall and floor. It also resulted in sitespecific art, since it could not be removed from the site of its creation without substantially altering the work. By the late 1960s, Serra was making objects now extremely heavy geometric lead forms and invoking such themes as gravity, fear, and life and death. In Corner Prop (fig. 29.24), an enormous lead cube weighing thousands of pounds is precariously propped up against the wall with a lead rod, with nothing securing either element. The piece, like much of Serra s sculpture from this period, communicates an unmistakable threat of violent collapse and an aura of danger that can be terrifying. In an even more frightening piece, Serra placed an enormous rectangular lead plate on the floor and another directly above, at a right angle, attached to the ceiling. The viewer was expected to walk on the one plate, thereby passing under the other. Serra s sculptures may look like Minimal Art, but they are loaded with narrative and emotion. Earthworks and Site-Specific Art By the late 1960s, the Post-Minimal aesthetic operated on an enormous scale, not only far beyond the confines of the gallery but far away from the art world, and in many instances in uninhabited remote areas. Several artists began sculpting with earth, snow, volcanoes, lightning, and deep-sea sites, their work often temporary and existing today only in photographs and drawings. Often the work had a strong geometric component, reflecting the influence of Minimal Art and Hard-Edge Abstraction. But in contrast, this sculpture generally was filled with references, including environmental, ontological (concerned with the nature of being), and political issues, as we will see in the work of Robert Smithson and the team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. 29.24 Richard Serra, Corner Prop. 1969. Lead antimony, box 25 * 25 * 25" (63.5 * 63.5 * 63.5 cm), pole 6'8" (2.03 m) CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1059 One of the most famous earthworks, works of art created by manipulating the natural environment, is Spiral Jetty (fig. 29.25), a site-specific sculpture made by Robert Smithson (1938 1973) in 1970. Smithson, who was a friend of Serra s, became a prominent figure in the New York art world in the mid- to late 1960s because of his articles on art, which often took an environmental approach to discussing land and nature. He also became known for his nonsite sculptures, which were landscapes consisting of rocks and stones from specific sites (often in neighboring New Jersey) that Smithson put into geometrically shaped metal bins or mirrored boxes on a gallery floor. A map or aerial photograph showed the actual site of the landscape. Instead of painting a landscape, Smithson was re-presenting the real thing in the form of what looks like a Minimal sculpture. What a viewer was witnessing was the entropy, or steady degradation, of the land as it was removed from one site and taken to another. Like Hesse s sculpture, Smithson s Minimalist-looking sculpture is full of references and issues, which is apparent in Spiral Jetty. The work is 1,500 feet long, 15 feet wide, and involved moving 6,650 tons of earth and black basalt. It is located at Rozel Point, a remote area of U ah s Great Salt Lake, whose surrounding ROBERT SMITHSON landscape looks like an industrial wasteland because of the rusting, discarded mining equipment littering the vicinity. Just as time consumes civilization, and all things for that matter, so too will the jetty eventually disappear as it erodes into the lake. The spiral form, as it wraps around itself, going nowhere, and trapping microorganisms that turn the water red, seems like the relic of a prehistoric civilization. Rather than just a minimal geometric shape to be admired for its own sake, Spiral Jetty is a powerful sculpture that utilizes time as a major component to speak about the entropy of all things. C H R I S T O A N D J E A N N E - C L A U D E Christo (Christo Javacheff, b. 1935) is a Bulgarian-born American artist. He met his Frenchborn American wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude (JeanneClaude de Guillebon, b. 1935) in Paris in 1958. There, the couple were interested in creating a social dialogue and provoking their audience to think about their immediate world. In one work, Christo and Jeanne-Claude dammed up a narrow Paris street with a neat Minimalist-looking stack of barrels, preventing passage. However, they are best known for wrapping unidentified objects in fabric, stimulating viewer curiosity about the object as well as the reason for the gesture. In 1964, they moved to New York. 29.25 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty. 1970. Total length 1,500' (457.2 m); width of jetty 15' (4.57 m). Great Salt ake, tah 1060 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 29.2 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, unning Fene, Sonoma and Marin counties, California. 1972 76. 18' + 241*2 miles (5.5 m + 39.4 km) abric, Their goal was to operate on an environmental or architectural scale, which they first did on a small scale in 1961 in Cologne (Dckside Packages) and on a large scale in 1969 when they wrapped a 1-million-suare-foot section of a rocky coast in Australia. Since then they have wrapped enormous buildings, and a bridge, and surrounded 11 islands with floating fabric, creating site-specific sculptures. Reproduced here is Running Fence (fig. 29.26), proposed in 1972 and executed in 1976. On the one hand, the work looks like Minimal Art, since it consists of predetermined mathematical units that extend to fill an allocated space, here the 241 2-mile (39.5-km) hilly terrain in California s Sonoma and Marin counties, with one terminus literally ending in the ocean. Each segment is 18 feet high and consists of cloth attached to steel poles. But this work is not only about the object itself, which was removed by the artists after being displayed for two weeks. Rather, it includes the entire process of implementing the concept: from the endless negotiations with government officials and landowners (mostly ranchers), the acuiring and supervising of an enormous workforce, the manufacturing of the work, and removal of it. It took four years to produce, the largest stumbling block being the tremendous community resistance. But the dialogue resulted in a raised consciousness about the land. It forced people to look at the land, and to think about it, recognizing how it was financially, emotionally, and aesthetically valued. The use of the word fence in the title specifically raised issues about how the land was to be used, and for whom. Once installed, Running Fence transformed the landscape. The fence itself was like a fleet of ships sailing across hill and dale. Probably hundreds of thousands of people came to experience it. In a documentary of the project, one rancher, who had fought the installation, described how he and his son slept next to the fence one night listening to it ripple in the wind, watching the stars in effect undergoing a transformative experience. And then it was gone. Nothing was left, except memories of experiences, pieces of the cloth, which were given to the landowners, and hundreds of drawings that Christo had made to finance the $3.2 million project, which Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid for themselves. CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1061 Conceptual Art: Art as Idea champ had made ideas the Although the renchman Marcel focus of art beginning in the 1910s (see page 970) and American George Brecht had begun to create a kind of conceptual art in the 1950s (see page 1047), the term itself did not become commonplace until the late 1960s, when a large number of artists started producing art that emphasized ideas rather than the aesthetics of style. Of course, ideas appear in all art, but the ideas are closely tied to the formal qualities of the art and cannot exist without them. In Conceptual Art, the art generally exists solely as an idea, with no visual manifestation other than words. Or the idea or information can appear as a graph, chart, map, or documentary photograph. In addition to works that are entirely Conceptual, we can also talk about art that is basically visual and aesthetic but has a Conceptual component as well. or example, Smithson s S iral Jetty has such an element for we now that the work is going to very slowly disappear, which is something that was not visible when it was made in 1970. But with the Conceptual artists, idea, concept, or information will be the consuming quality of the work. K O S T H By the late 1960s, more and more artists were making art based on ideas, and in 1970, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition entitled nformation, dedicated to Conceptual Art and taking as its thesis that art provides information and ideas, not visual aesthetics. The show s cocurator was artist Joseph osuth (b. 1945). Characteristic of osuth s own work is One an Three Chairs (fig. 29.27) of 1965, in which he combined a large gelatin-silver print of a folding chair with the real chair and a photograph of OSEPH a dictionary definition of a chair. By using words instead of just an image, osuth tells us how cerebral and nonaesthetic his intentions are. The work appears to be a textbook study in semiotics the science of signs a popular topic in universities and in a small segment of the art community at the time. In the language of semiotics, the real chair is the signified, the photograph is the signifier, signifying that particular chair, and the dictionary definition is the idealized nonspecific chair. By arranging three versions of a chair in this particular way, osuth has determined their context, which leads a viewer to consider issues of language and meaning, rather than such typical art issues as beauty and expression. Reading the definition, we tend to think of the real chair next to it. If it were not present, we would probably think of some other chair from our own experience. If we look only at the photograph of a chair, we may even think the subject of the photograph is not necessarily the chair but the absence of a person sitting in the chair. The title is an important part of the work, for it too provides context, suggesting we can view the chairs as the same chair (one chair) or as three different chairs with very different stories. In other words, this work is about ideas as much as it is about the aesthetics of the visual presentation, which is as unemotional and straightforward as Minimalism. ltimately, the task of establishing meaning is the viewer s. One an Three Chairs also reflects a new approach to photography that appeared in the mid-1960s: The medium was no longer the sacred preserve of professional photographers, who worked on a modest scale, carefully took their own photographs, and often slaved over their prints. Now, photographs were used by Installation, Earthwork, Performance, and Conceptual artists, who in their primary medium often worked on a large scale. 29.2 Joseph osuth, ne an hree Chairs. 1965. Wooden folding chair, photographic copy of chair, and photographic enlargement of dictionary definition of chair chair, 323*8 + 147*8 + 207*8" (82.2 + 37.8 + 53 cm) photo panel, 36 + 241*8" (91.5 + 61 cm) text panel, 24 + 241*8" (61. + 62.2 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Larry Aldrich oundation und 102 A RT IV T H E M O D ER N W O R L D They now made photographs based on their work, and produced large photographs to suggest the scale of their primary work, the photographs even rivaling painting in size. Generally, they did not take their own pictures, and few if any did their own printing. Most shocking to traditional photographers, they often integrated photography into other mediums, as Kosuth did in ne an hree Chairs, thus violating the time-honored integrity of the medium. Beuys (1921 1986) was a German Conceptual artist who produced work so complex and rich in ideas it is nearly impossible to pin down exactly what his art is. His objects, diagrams, photographs, and performances interrelate so tightly that no one piece can comfortably stand on its own. He was based in Düsseldorf, a city that by the 1970s was home to many of the world s leading artists, its art scene perhaps second only to New York s. Beuys played a major role in developing this artistic climate. His impact included spurring German artists to confront their nation s Nazi past, to rediscover the German Romantic tradition, and to invest their art with spirituality, much as the German Expressionists had done in the early twentieth century. Two key factors in Beuys s development were his experiences in World War II as a fighter pilot in Hitler s Luftwaffe (airforce) and the 1963 arrival in Düsseldorf of the Fluxus artists. Beuys propagated a myth that his plane was shot down in 1943 in a snowstorm over Crimea, and that nomadic Tartars saved him from freezing to death by covering him in animal fat and layers of felt, materials that became a foundation for much of his sculptural work. Whatever Beuys s war experience actually was, it was clearly traumatic, for after attending the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the late 1940s, he disappeared into the German countryside to work as a farmhand and purge himself of his guilt and anxiety. In 1961, Beuys was teaching at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and two years later he was introduced to Fluxus, adopting Performance Art and joining them for a segment of their European tour. In 1965, he performed How to Ex lain Pictures to a Dea Hare (fig. 29.28). For three hours he moved his lips as if silently lecturing the dead hare cradled in his arm about the pictures surrounding him on the walls. Attached to his left sole was felt, and to his right, steel, the one representing spiritual warmth, the other hard reason. Honey and gold paint covered Beuys s head, transforming him into a shaman, a high priest who uses magic to cure ills. The honey represented a life force. This mysterious ritualistic performance was about the meaninglessness of conventional picture making art that had to be explained and about the need to replace it with a more spiritual and natural form of communication, an art the meaning of which could be felt or intuited by a viewer rather than understood intellectually. The performance was designed to create a magical art that would cause people to invest their own lives with spirituality. Everyone who watched the performance apparently found it riveting and unforgettable, even if they did not understand it. His objects, too, such as a worn wooden chair with a pile of fat on its seat, affected people similarly. JOSEPH BEUYS 29.28 Joseph Beuys, %ow to &'(lain Pictures to a Dea) %are. 1965. Performed at Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf, Germany elevision Art: Nam "une Pai# ! Another artist who participated in Fluxus activities in Düsseldorf in the early 1960s was the Korean-born musician, Performance artist, and sculptor Nam June Paik (1932 2006). Paik s background was in music, but shortly after studying composition with John Cage in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1958, he became a radical Performance artist, exploring unconventional mediums. Living in Düsseldorf in 1963 and performing in the Fluxus program, he began making art using television monitors. He labeled television the electronic superhighway and declared it the medium of the future, dedicating his life to working with it. His earliest television art used single monitors with simple abstract patterns, such as a single horizontal or vertical line. Or using a magnet, he distorted a television signal to create arclike or wavy compositions. In 1964, he moved to New York, and with the launch of the CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1063 29.29 Nam June Paik, SuperhighAayB Q@ntinental S.S. 1995. InstallationV Wortyseven-channel closedcircuit video installation with 313 monitors, laser disk images with sound, steel structure and neon, 15 * 32 * 4' (4.57 * 9.75 * 1.2 m). Courtesy Nam June Paik Studio, New York >le?tr@ni? first affordable video camera by Sony, he began to use video as well as live-broadcast television. Paik s work in the 1970s became increasingly grand and complex. Typical of the more elaborate structure of the later work is a piece from 1995, Electronic Superhighway* Continental +.S. (fig. 29.29). ,ed by numerous computer-controlled video channels, this installation consists of dozens of monitors inserted in a neon map of the 48 continental states. The rapidly changing images generally relate to the respective states, except for New York, which was fed from a live camera in the New York Holly Solomon Gallery, where the work was shown and from where our reproduction originates. In -le/troni/ Superhighway, Paik reaffirms the prevalence of television in American society, presenting his work with the fast-paced continuous stream of information characteristic of broadcast television. The work celebrates American vernacular culture, both in its use of neon and television as mediums and in the Americana presented on the videos. Television is America, Paik tells us. It is, in effect, real life, because most Americans experience the world through their television screens. Paik is not condemning the medium, which would be antithetical to the objective position of a ,luxus artist, but simply revealing its power to define contemporary life. 10<= PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D ART W 0 TH A SOC 0 A 1 A 3 ENDA Most of the postwar artists discussed thus far did not have a social agenda. Even some who did, such as 4ichtenstein and Warhol, subversively buried their message so that it was not readily visible, especially to the groups they criticized. While an atmosphere of counterculture dominated the vanguard art world paralleling the social revolution occurring not only in America but also worldwide by the late 1960s, few artists made political art. By the 1970s, however, the trickle of artists making work that dealt with social issues began to swell into a torrent. So great was its influence that we now think of social issues as playing a major role in avant-garde art for the last 35 years. An art with a social agenda became a key component of 1970s Post-Minimalism. Street Ph9t9graphy Not everyone was caught up in the economic boom and technological euphoria of the 1950s. Some observers, including many outstanding photographers, perceived serious problems within American society. In part inspired by the powerful photographs of Walker Evans (see fig. 28.54), they trained their cameras on the injustices smoldering beneath the placid surface of society and made what is often called street photography, a reference to their taking to the streets to find their imagery. They were free to do so because photography was not handcuffed by the Modernist aesthetics of painting and sculpture that demanded an increasingly abstract nonreferential art. Perhaps the best known of the postwar street photographers is Robert Frank (b. 1924), who emigrated from Switzerland in the 1940s. In 1955, Frank crisscrossed the nation, taking candid, unposed photographs in banal public settings, which he then published as a photoessay in a book called The Americans (1958). American publishers found his view of America so grim that Frank had to go to France to find someone to produce the book. An American edition finally came out in 1959 with an introduction by Jack Kerouac (1922 1969), author of the classic Beatnik novel On the Road (195X). Like his friend George Segal, Frank used his work to reflect his concerns about the alienation and lack of spirituality in twentieth-century America. Drug Store, Detroit (fig. 29.30) is characteristic of his national portrait of emptiness, alienation, and despair. YZder a barrage of bold advertising (reminding us of Andy Warhol s Campbell s Soup Cans), some 15 men order, among other items, artificial orange whips, each patron seemingly unaware of the others. On the other side of the counter dutifully serving the white males are African-American women, undoubtedly working for a minimum wage. Just as the cake is trapped in the airless foreground case, the waitresses seem trapped behind the counter in the drudgery of their menial jobs. The glare of bare fluorescent bulbs bouncing off linoleum, Formica, and plastic is a reminder of the period s deadening aesthetic of efficiency and modernity, while the monotonous lineup of jukeboxes on the counter opposite the patrons underlines the sell, sell, sell mentality of American business. YZlike Bourke-White, Evans and Lange (see pages 1018 and 1029), Frank avoids refinement in his documentary photographs. His prints are blurry and gritty, and grimy blacks violently contrast with whites. Their harsh crudeness projects an undercurrent of unease and disquiet. We sense the speed with which Frank operated in the informal settings he encountered, wielding his 35mm single-lens reflex camera as spontaneously as his instinct dictated. It should come as no surprise that the downtown Detroit where this photograph was taken was largely destroyed during the race riots of the late 1960s. (For a discussion of a second documentary photographer, Lee Friedlander, from this period, see the Introduction.) African-American Art: Ethnic Identity Other American artists soon joined the street photographers and began doing what had been unthinkable in the art world of the 1960s: turning their backs on both Minimalism and abstraction in general and instead making art about the nation s problems and issues, particularly those concerning race, ethnic background, gender, and sexual orientation. Because of the Civil Rights Movement, African-American artists were challenged to make art about their 29.30 Robert Frank, Drug Store, Detroit. 1955. Gelatin silver print, 11 * 14" (2[.9 * 35.5 cm). Courtesy of the Pace MacGill Gallery, New York heritage. At college and in art school, they were trained like everyone else to make abstract art. But their communities pressured them to do the exact opposite: Make narrative art and take up the black cause. To balance both claims was a challenge. B E A R D E N In New York in 1963, a number of African-American artists formed a loose group called Spiral, dedicated to supporting the Civil Rights Movement. They met in the studio of Romare Bearden (1911 1988), a New York Yniversity-educated mathematician and philosopher who in the 1940s increasingly became a committed artist. Influenced by Martin Luther King, Jr. s 1963 March on Washington, D.C., Bearden suggested a collaborative project for Spiral that involved the members all contributing to a large photocollage about black ROMARE CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1065 PRIMARY SOURCE Romare Bearden (1911 1988) From a \]^_ intervie` `ith aoseph aaboes Romare Bearden talks about why collage was so important for him and its relationship to jazz. ne of the attractions of collage for me is it allows me to work which is a very twentieth-century attitude. ije development of the machine, and now of the computer, killed man s capacity for patience. lt is too nervous a century for people to paint the way man van Eyck painted, for enrmple. sany modern super-realist paintings, which may look as detailed as a tan Eyck, are made from photographs or slides which get prouected onto the canvas and are then painted. Collage is the cutting out rather than the painting of things, and it allows a more direct way to get something down. must cut it out and put it down. yo, the physicality of the medium did not attract me to collage. Also, l don t think of my use of collage as an enz{nsion of Abstract guickly, |n}ressionism. Rather l would like to think of it within the contenz of Cubism. sy guarrel with Abstract |n}ressionism, if any, is that sometimes the space is naturalistic. lf you place in one area of the canvas a large field of blue, and then in another area you put an orange, you have painted sunlight, which is naturalistic space and light. l prefer to bring things forward, not uust for the sake of making Cubism, but to make flat painting and not fool the eye with depth and perspective. And that is achieved by having the collage sit on the surface. ~es, you can draw parallels between my work and uazz. As you uust said, there is a spirit that is there before a work is begun and develops with the work that is similar to the kind of improvisation that one gets in uazz. ma has a rhythmic component, and it also has interval. jen you listen to the piano of Earl ines, what really counts is the silences between the notes struck. ije same importance of interval can be seen in confetti thrown at a weddin the confetti dazzles the eye, but it is the spaces between the pieces that really causes things to happen. Source: osep acobs, ine the arem Renaissane: 5 ears f Afr-Amerian Art ( e Center aery of ucne niersity, 198). ewisbur, ennsyania. 198 29.1 Romare earden, The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism. 196. Collage of photochemical reproduction, synthetic polymer, and pencil on paperboard, 9* + 1 ¡3. + 3¢.£ cm¤. ¥irshhorn ¦useum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian §nstitution, ¨ashington, ©.C. Gift of ªoseph ¥. ¥irshhorn, 1966 1066 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D identity. When no one turned up, Bearden undertook the project by himself, cutting up newspapers and magazines to make collages, for which he became famous. The composition of Bearden s collages is based on Cubism, as seen in The Pre«alence o¬ itual: ®aptism (fig. 29.31), created in 1964, but the subject matter is distinctly African-American. Bearden grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, before moving to New York City s Harlem, and the fractured image shows a baptism, reflecting the importance of religion in black culture. The faces not only express the African physiognomy but in some instances also suggest African masks. This work has the effect of tracing American culture back to its African roots and reinforcing the continuous importance of ritual and community. The collage composition has a wild syncopation and even a sense of improvisation that seems to relate to the black jazz musicians of the period, such as Charlie Parker or John Coltrane. (See Primary Source, page 1066.) The power of Bearden s work lies in the artist s ability to pack so much information and energy into a single image that it overflows with the vitality and essence of the African-American experience, an energy we saw as well in the small temperas of Jacob Lawrence (see fig. 28.49). At virtually the same moment, Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) took an entirely different approach to reflecting his racial background. Raised in Houston, Texas, and studying welded-steel sculpture and formalist aesthetics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Edwards was outraged at the lynchings of blacks in the South, which were increasing as the Ku Klux Klan responded to the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, he began to make a series of relief sculptures entitled Lynch ¯ra°ments (fig. 29.32), incorporating chains and spikes and brutal metal fragments, all of which took on a brown tonality when oiled to prevent rusting. While there is no set reading of these works which Edwards, a New York resident, continues to make today along with monumental sculpture they evoke oppression, bondage, violence, and anger, as well as skin color. They also appear to refer to African masks (which the artist denies is intended) and ritual, and in their bold frontality they display a sense of confrontation and dignity. These basically abstract works, which fulfilled the demands of his university teaching to make nonrepresentational art, are so open to interpretation that we can view them as autobiographical as well. A horseshoe that appears in many of the Lynch ¯ra°ments is the artist s reminiscence of visits to his uncle s ranch outside of Houston. Edwards s political and expressive abstraction stands in stark contrast to the Minimalist Art being produced at the same time and anticipated Post-Minimal sculpture. MELVIN EDWARDS With Betye Saar (b. 1926), there is no attempt to accommodate the art establishment by catering to formalist abstraction. Her work is brazenly representational and, like Bearden, her themes are obviously dedicated to her AfricanAmerican heritage. Saar, who is from Los Angeles, where she still lives, got her B.A. in design from the University of California, BETYE SAAR 29.32 Melvin Edwards, Lynch ²ra³ment: Some ´ri³ht Mornin³. 1963. Welded steel, 141*4 + 91*4 + 5" (36.2 + 23.5 + 12.7 cm). Collection of the artist Los Angeles, and graduate degrees in education and printmaking from nearby universities. But it was not until she experienced first hand the Surrealist assemblage boxes of the New Yorker Joseph Cornell in 1968 that she found her mature artistic voice. She began working in the same technique, as can be seen in Shield o¬ ±uality (fig. 29.33) of 1974. The work is part of a series of boxes inspired by the death of the artist s great-aunt. Each is like a Victorian keepsake box, containing relics of the ancestor a glove, a feather from a hat, lace, buttons, and a baby spoon, for example. Vintage photographs are arranged in a triptych, transforming the box into a portable altar. The shrine pays homage to the values the great-aunt handed down, values reflected in the quality and propriety of the objects themselves. And the box counters America s racial stereotyping by presenting African Americans as middle-class, a reminder that Saar was born in 1926 and grew up in precivil-rights America. Like so much of Saar s work, Shield o¬ ±uality focuses on women and is also about female pride and the important role of CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1067 29.33 Betye SaarÃ Shield ÄÅ Æuality. 1974. Mixed media, 18 + 143*4 + 1" (45.7 + 36.4 + 2.5 cm). Collection of the Newark Museum. Purchase 1998, The Members Çund (98.37). Photograph courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, ÈÈC, New York women in society. Clearly, by working on a small-scale and making delicate effeminate work, Saar was defying the art establishment, turning her back on the enormous canvases and sculptures being churned out by white males. With Saar, we have stepped into the feminist era. Feminist Art: udy ¶hi·ag¸ and Gender ¹dentity µ Betty ºriedan s 1963 book The Fe»inine Mystique signaled the start of the feminist movement. Almost simultaneously a number of women artists began making work that dealt with women s issues. Nancy Spero (b. 1926) made simple but powerful expressionistic drawings depicting violence toward women, while Mimi Smith (b. 1942) made what is now recognized as the first American clothing art, objects such as a Minimalist Girdle (1966), constructed of rubber bathmats that capture the discomfort of women s clothing. And, as just discussed, Betye Saar made boxes that paid homage to women. The best-known work coming out of the women s movement is The ¼inner Party (fig. 29.34), orchestrated by Judy Chicago (b. 1939) and made by over 400 women between 1974 and 1979. By the late 1960s, Chicago was a dedicated feminist, who in the early 1970s established a ºeminist Art Program, the first of its kind, at California State ½¾iversity at ºresno. Shortly thereafter, with artist Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923), she started a second similar 1068 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D program at the California Institute of the Arts in ¿alencia. The thrust of these courses was to encourage women to make art and deal with gender issues, which the art world, including university and art-school faculties, said she could not do because the work did not conform to the aesthetic norms of Modernist formalism that signified serious art. The ºeminist Art Program was designed to provide support for women artists and to redefine aesthetic values in contemporary art. The ¼inner Party reflects Chicago s shift from a maker of abstract Minimalist objects and paintings to works on feminist themes in alternative mediums and installations. It pays homage to the many important women who Chicago felt were ignored, underrated, or omitted from the history books. Chicago laboriously researched these lost figures. She then designed a triangular table with 39 place settings, 13 to a side, each honoring a significant woman, ranging from ancient goddesses to such twentieth-century icons as Georgia O Keeffe. In addition, 919 other women s names are inscribed on the white floor tiles lying in the triangular intersection of the tables. Each place setting included a hand-painted ceramic plate that pictured a vagina executed in a period style. American poet Emily Dickinson s sex, for example, is surrounded by lace, and ºrench Àueen Eleanor of AÀuitaine s is encased in a ÁleurÂdeÂlis. ½nder each place setting is an embroidered runner, often elaborate and again in period style. Instead of using bulldozers, chainsaws, hoists, and welding eÀuipment as men did for their environments, Chicago intention- Judy Chicago, þhe Dinner Party. 1979. Mixed media, ÿ * 48 * 42' (0.9 * 17.6 * 12.8 m) Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York úûü3ý ally turned to mediums associated with women painted china, ceramics, and embroidery and created an elegant, beautiful work that subtly operates on an epic scale, spanning millennia. Also present is a sense of community and ritual, for we feel as though Chicago has appropriated and transformed the Christian male theme of the Last Supper into a spiritual communion of women. ÉÊËÌ ÍÎÏÌÐÑÒÓË Ê ÐÔÕÒ ËÌÔ ËÖ ÐÌ Modernist architecture thrived after World War II, especially in America, which had previously preferred traditionalist architecture ×skyscrapers, for example, in a ØÙthic styleÚ as discussed in the previous chapter ×see pages 1020 21Ú. But now Modernist architecture was only a look or style. It no longer had the utopian vision and revolutionary zeal to improve the world that we saw in the Ûigh Modernism of De Stijl and the Bauhaus ×see pages 1007 10Ú , and in the art and design of Constructivist Productivism ×see pages 100Ü 05Ú. Ûowever, some of the most influential buildings of the period continued to be built by the major Ûigh Modernist architectsÝ Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. While Mies continued the International Style aesthetic of light, floating geometric buildings with taut, thin glass walls, Þrank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, joined by the emerging Philadelphia architect Louis ßahn, developed a sculptural architecture that emphasized mass and the physical presence of a building, and they were not afraid to be referential. Continuing the ànternational Style: áuâwig ãies äan âer åohe Postwar Late Modernism resulted in glass boxes sprouting up in urban centers and dotting the beltways that circled American cities, especially beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. The glass box çèéêëìí îï ê ð ñ ë ò éí ë ð êð ñ ë ó ð ô ì í õ ö 1ï÷ø 1ï ù0 10æ9 begin to approach the perfection that Mies achieved with his aesthetic of Less is more (see page 1010). We can see these minimal gestures in the Seagram Building. Mies began by removing the 38-story building from its urban environment and placing it on a pedestal, that is a plaza elevated above street level. The plaza is simple but sumptuous; it is made of pink granite, has two shallow pools placed symmetrically on either side of the building, and is surrounded by a low serpentine marble wall. The weightless tinted glass-and-bronze tower sits on a colonnade of pilotis that leaves the first floor open, and every detail, including the paving stones, is carefully proportioned to create a sense of perfection and elegance. With the rise of Hitler in Germany, Mies had joined Moholy-Nagy at the new Bauhaus in Chicago, and in the Seagram Building we can see the influence of the nineteenth-century Chicago School in the emphasis on the skeletal grid of the building. To acknowledge the functionalism of the grid, Mies used thin I-beams for the mullions between windows. They provide the vertical accent that the proportions of the horizontal spandrels so perfectly counterbalance with their thin ridges on top and bottom. Inside and out, lavish, beautifully harmonized materials embellish the building s exquisite proportions. Sculptural Architecture: Referential Mass Mies s architecture was essentially nonreferential, just like Minimalist sculpture. However, his contemporaries Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright took Late Modernist architecture in a different direction. Their buildings contain references and are organic, if not outright expressionistic. Made of poured concrete, they are massive monumental buildings that have a powerful sculptural presence. In his late style, Le Corbusier abandoned the taunt, light walls and floating architecture of his early villas for a massive, sculptural, and even referential style. This late work can be quite expressive, even to the point of being oppressively massive and harsh, and it is often referred to as Brutalist. Especially abrasive is his use of concrete, which instead of being smooth and highly finished is now left raw, having a rough texture and revealing the pattern of the wood forms. A sculptural masterpiece from this period is Notre-Dame-duHaut (fig. 29.36), a chapel in Ronchamp, France, built from 1950 to 1955. While the main interior space is basically simple, an oblong nave, the exterior erupts with diagonals and curves. The concrete-covered masonry walls are thick and massive, and the poured concrete roof, which is hollow and the concrete left raw, is ponderous, even if it paradoxically seems to float. Visitors enter the front through an enormous fissure in the wall, giving them a sense of slipping through a cleft in a rock formation. The pointed façade reminds us of a ship s prow, while the roof recalls the bottom of a boat, allusions to such vessels of salvation as Noah s Ark and St. Peter s fishing boat. But these shapes also suggest a nun s cowl, praying hands, and a church spire. The vertical towerlike LE CORBUSIER 29.35 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Seagram Building, New York. 1954 58 became the required image for corporate headquarters, such as I. M. Pei and Henry N. Cobb s John Hancock Center in Boston (1977) and Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill s Sears Tower in Chicago (1974). If one were to choose a single building to epitomize the Late Modernist skyscraper it would have to be Mies van der Rohe s Seagram Building (fig. 29.35) in New York, built from 1954 to 1958, with interiors by Philip Johnson (1906 2005). This building was imitated worldwide, but rarely did the imitations 1070 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 29.6 Le Corbusier. Notre-Dame-du-aut from the southeast Ronchamp, rance. 1950 55 forms to the left, a bell tower, and right resemble the nearby prehistoric dolmens of Carnac see fig. 1.24. A sense of the primordial continues in the cavelike interior, where the ceiling precipitously drops from 2 feet over the altar to 16 feet in the center of the room. Faint streams of colored light pierce the stained-glass windows set in the thick walls fig. 29.37, gently illuminating the space and giving it a mystical aura. Regardless of religion, anyone visiting Notre-Dame-du-Haut is likely to be transported to the realm of the mysterious and magical. L L O Y D W R I G H T Rising almost simultaneously in New York as Mies van der Rohe s Seagram Building was Frank Lloyd Wright s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, located some 50 blocks north in Manhattan. For a discussion of this building, see the Introduction and fig. I.16. FRANK 29.7 Le Corbusier. Interior of Notre-Dame-du-aut. CHAP TER 29 P OSTW AR TO POS TMODERN, 1945 1980 1071 29. 8 Louis Kahn. National Assembly Building, Dacca, Bangladesh. 1962 Louis Kahn (1901 1974) is a difficult artist to place and is alternatively labeled an Expressionist, a Brutalist, and a Proto-Postmodernist. He was in his fifties when he finally found his architectural voice, largely due to a year spent at the American Academy in Rome in 1950 51. Here, he awakened to the importance and power of the ancient monuments of the Mediterranean, from the pyramids of Egypt to the baths and aqueducts of Rome to the Athenian Akropolis. Their bold, sculptural forms and pure geometry evoked a timeless serenity and Classical grandeur and became the building blocks of his Modernist aesthetic. In the late 1950s, Kahn discovered the Expressionist, Brutalist style of late Le Corbusier, of whom Kahn said, He was my teacher, although he didn t know it. He rejected High Modernism s emphasis on light volume defined by a taut membrane as he instead designed massive, weighty LOUIS KAHN 1072 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D structures that evoked ancient civilizations that seemed capable of defying the ravages of time. We can see these qualities in his 1962 ferroconcrete National Assembly Building in Dacca, Bangladesh (fig. 29.38). The assembly chamber is in the center, surrounded by concentric circles of meeting rooms, press offices, and a mosque, each building separated by unroofed walkways, creating a veritable light-filled city. Monumental triangles, rectangles, and circles puncture the massive walls of each ring of rooms, allowing light to filter in and virtually structure the space. The entire complex looks like a fortress, the outer wall projecting the sublime presence of antiquity, although functionally it is designed to keep out the harsh sun of the Indian subcontinent. As we shall see in the next chapter, Kahn s referential architecture would inspire the next generation of architects. Postwar to Postmodern, 1945 1980 1950 Jackson Pollock s Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 1940 1954 58 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe s Seagram Building 1950 * 1945 49 Jean-Paul Sartre publishes his existential trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) * 1950 53 Korean War * 1955 68 First phase of the civil rights movement 1956 Tunisia gains independence from France, launching the independence movement in Africa 1956 William H. Whyte publishes The Organization Man, a description of impact of mass organization, especially corporations, on the United States 1957 Jack Kerouac publishes On the Road 1957 Russia launches Sputnik I * 1955 Robert Frank s Drugstore, Detroit 1955 58 Robert Rauschenberg s Odalisk * 1960 * * 1962 Andy Warhol s Campbell s Soup Cans * * * * 1965 Joseph Beuys s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare * 1970 * * 1963 Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique ca. 1965 Commercial portable video cameras become available 1965 United States enters the Vietnam War 1966 Jewish Museum, New York, mounts Primary Structures, first exhibition of Minimal Art 1968 The leftist student protest and strikes in Paris in May that eventually brought about the fall of the De Gaulle government 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City as gays respond to police persecution 1969 Woodstock Festival, Bethel, New York 1969 Moon landing 1970 Museum of Modern Art, New York presents Information, first exhibition of Conceptual Art 1971 Greenpeace Foundation founded 1970 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty 1980 1979 Judy Chicago s The Dinner Party 1073 T CHAPTER 30 The Postmodern Era: Art Since 1980 HE ART THAT CAME TO THE ART WORLD S ATTENTION TOWARD 1980 is generally known as Postmodern art. The term was coined in the mid-1960s by European literary critics, and was applied to the theories of such French philosophers as Jacques Derrida (1930 2004), Roland Barthes (1915 1980), and Michel Foucault (1926 1984), as well as to the sociologist and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard (1979 2007) and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901 1981). At the heart of much European Postmodernism, which is also called Deconstructionism or PostStructuralism, is the premise that all text, and by extension visual art, contains hidden hierarchies of meaning by which, as Derrida expressed it, an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as their hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings. In other words, any text or artwork has an agenda, or point of view, as does any interpretation or use of a text or art. Revealing this agenda means deconstructing it. The result is there are no fixed truths or realities, no absolutes just hierarchies, which are forever changing. We shall see an especially fine example of this theory later in the chapter when we look at the art of Fred Wilson, who in 1992 placed slave manacles in a case of fine silver at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore (see fig. 30.19). The society was presenting the silver as refined aesthetic objects, reflecting the evolution of style. By inserting the manacles, Wilson changed the context of the silver, and thus he changed its meaning as well now the goblets, pitchers, and teapots became icons of wealth brought about by the enslavement of blacks. As reflected in Wilson s deconstruction of the historical society s display, artists and critics starting in the late 1970s began to digest Frank Gehry. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain. See also figure 30.9 European Postmodernism and were applying it to art. They were especially interested in how art functioned as a visual language, particularly as one of propaganda, manipulation, and power that determined taste and values and structured, for example, ethnic, sexual, racial, and gender identities. In a sense, these ideas were not entirely new to the 1970s art world. We have already seen Marcel Duchamp dealing with similar issues in the 1910s, and Robert Rauschenberg, George Brecht, Joseph Kosuth, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and especially Sigmar Polke touching on them as well in the 1950s and 1960s. While the immediate seeds of Postmodernism in the visual arts date from this time, a self-consciousness about entering a new era only occurred in the art world in the late 1970s. In large part, this new awareness stemmed from the critical writing in a new art magazine, October, founded in 1976, which reflected European Postmodern philosophy. (See www.myartslab.com.) As a result, a large number of artists and critics asked more overtly and persistently: How do words and images acquire meaning? What is the message? Who originates it? What and whose purpose does it serve? Who is the audience and what does this tell us about the message? Who controls the media and for whom? More and more artists, such as Fred Wilson, began using familiar images in new contexts, revealing or deconstructing their deeper social, political, economic, and aesthetic meanings. The preferred mediums for many of these artists were those of the mass media, namely photography, electronic signs, billboards, and video. CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1075 N Berlin Düsseldorf SWEDEN S ea NORWAY CANADA Stuttgart ub Dan NORT H AM ER ICA UNITED STATES M i ss o Portland ur FRANCE Towson Cincinnati Washington, D.C. London AUSTRIA ITALY 200 km Princeton Philadelphia GERMANY Vienna SWITZ. AUSTRIA FRANCE ROMANIA ITALY SPAIN PORTUGAL See inset Madrid BULGARIA Rome Medite 200 miles rr GREECE ne ip iss ALGERIA Mi ss Los Angeles Moscow USSR POLAND Paris Milan New York l Ba Berlin DENMARK NETH. Black Sea Istanbul TURKEY a pi SCOTLAND IRELAND Munich Zürich Toronto i e SWITZ. Ottawa Las Vegas CZECH REPUBLIC Paris ti c GERMANY an Sea MOROCCO New Orleams EGYPT MEXICO Gulf of Mexico 1,000 km AT L AN T IC CUBA Mexico City OCE A N C H I NA C ari b b ean Sea Se a PACIFIC OCEAN 1,000 miles S OUTH A M ER IC A 1,000 km NORTH KOREA SOUTH KOREA JAPAN Osaka AF RICA TAIWAN Hong Kong Ko Kon o g PHILIPPINE SEA VIETNAM PHILIPPINES 1,000 miles Map 30.1 Europe and North America in the 21st century While this Postmodernist attitude emerged toward 1980, it has been only one of numerous issues that have preoccupied the art world in the last 30 years. The period is characterized by pluralism, in effect continuing the pluralism associated with 1970s PostMinimalism (see pages 1058 69). Now, however, pluralism had a philosophical foundation in Postmodern theory. By denying any one system, reading, interpretation, or truth, Postmodern theory destroyed the credibility of the authoritarian hierarchies of styles, mediums, issues, and themes, and it opened the door for everything and everyone. It also had an enormous impact on art history, as art historians began to question the validity of the traditional story of art, generally told from a narrow viewpoint, generally male-centric and European-American, and emphasizing the evolution of style. Now, scholars approached art from countless angles, using issues of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, economics, and politics to demonstrate the many layers of meaning and ideas embedded in a work of art. In part, this trend had begun in the late 1960s, a result of the social revolution that accompanied the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War and challenged the validity of the status quo. Postmodernism marked the end of the Modernist era, which peaked in the 1950s and 1960s with such styles as Abstract Expressionism and Minimal Art. Modernism viewed modern art as a linear progression of one style building upon the last, continuously advancing art toward the new. Because of this emphasis on style, tremendous importance was placed on the individual and stylistic originality. But the pluralism of the 1970s accompanied by Postmodern theory ended the need for artists to invent the new. By the 1980s, artists had license not to be new. Not only did 1076 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D they appropriate art in every imaginable style and medium from the history of civilization and combine them as they saw fit, many of the leading artists, such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, and Damien Hirst, did not even concern themselves with cultivating a distinguishable style as they jumped from one medium to the next, relying on a theme rather than a look to tie their work together. Message was more important than a readily identifiable, single style, a hallmark of Modernism. Artists also challenged the premium that Modernism placed on individuality and authorship, with many artists collaborating or working in groups, such as the Guerrilla Girls and Group Material. The Postmodern era also redefined the nature of the art world itself. The art establishment widened to embrace artists of all ethnicities and races, accepting all kinds of mediums, styles, and issues without placing a value on one over another. In this new environment, often referred to as multiculturalism, artists who had been marginalized in the 1970s became mainstream. Furthermore, in the 1990s, artists from all over the world, not just America and Europe, played a major role in molding contemporary art. A benchmark exhibition for presenting this new world view was Magiciens de la Terre, organized in 1988 by the National Museum of Modern Art (Pompidou Center) in Paris and featuring artists from all the continents. The acceptance of artists worldwide mirrors the global restructuring of the last 20 years. The Cold War ended as the Berlin Wall fell in 1988 and the U.S.S.R. was dissolved soon after. Political and economic realignments resulted as first Russia and then China abandoned a strict adherence to Communism, experimented with capitalism, and opened up to foreign trade and investment. In the 1990s, Europe formed the European Union, and the United States, Mexico, and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Barriers were falling everywhere, with people crossing borders more readily than ever before. Another important force behind the creation of a world art is the long-term impact of the independence movements, especially in Africa and Asia, of the 1950s and 1960s. These new post-colonial nations asserted their cultural traditions as viable and valuable alternatives to mainstream culture, which in the last 25 years have increasingly been woven into the fabric of a world culture. But perhaps the communications field more than anything else was responsible for the creation of the Global Village. Television, cellular phones, satellites, computers, global positioning systems, and the Internet have linked the world, reminding us that the Post-Industrial era is also the Information Age. Today, the world s leading artists come from countries as varied as Lebanon, Iran, Israel, Cambodia, Thailand, Korea, India, Japan, China, South Africa, Mali, Russia, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, and Iceland. They readily travel the globe, often have studios in numerous countries, and exhibit regularly worldwide, especially participating in the international explosion of contemporary art fairs and annual or biennial art shows that take place in such disparate venues as Istanbul, Dubai, Moscow, Johannesburg, Saigon, Havana, and Shanghai. In this world of complex media and changing interpretations, scholars do not always agree on the meaning of Postmodernism. While the term initially was applied specifically to the European philosophy that emerged in the 1960s, today scholars and art historians use it quite loosely to encompass all of the art made since 1980. In effect, they use it to mean art made after Modernism, and we will use it in the same way here. But the sign that we have nonetheless entered a new era is the fact that we can no longer treat art as a succession of isms or styles. While some historians and critics have tried to identify movements or styles, such as Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo, and Neo-Conceptualism, these are forced labels that do not hold up to scrutiny. Unlike the other chapters in this book, the fine art will be presented not within the context of style but instead under headings of theme or issue. ARCHITECTURE Postmodernism appeared in architecture in the 1960s and was accompanied by a manifesto of sorts. In his book Complexity and Contradiction (1966), the architect Robert Venturi called for a new architecture, one that rejected the cold, abstract Modernist International Style. The new architecture would be referential, that is, buildings would recall earlier architectural styles, or contain motifs that referred to the past and present. By the 1980s, an architecture that the architectural community labeled Postmodern had emerged. The term, however, was used specifically to describe work that made references to earlier periods and styles. Since fundamental to European Postmodern theory is the concept that no one authoritative style or set of principles can prevail, architecture since the 1980s reflects a broad range of issues and interests, going well beyond just designing referential buildings. Among them is a revised Modernism, one strain of which we can call Hi-Tech because of its highly technological appearance. Another strain is Deconstructivism, a concept relating to Derrida s theories of Deconstruction and embracing the notion that architecture should not have a fixed structure or logic, thus being wide open to interpretation. Postmodern Architecture: A Referential Style Modernist architecture, best characterized by High Modernism or the International Style (see page 1010), was rule-bound and abstract. Some architectural critics as well as the general public found it cold and impersonal. With Postmodernist architecture, buildings, as in the nineteenth century, once again contain references to earlier architectural styles. Sometimes they project a sense of place, imparting an aura of uniqueness that makes them special to those using them. While Postmodern architecture did not come to the fore until about 1980, a handful of architects had been advocating and practicing a new architecture by the 1960s, among them Robert Venturi. Robert Venturi (b. 1925) upset the architectural establishment by attacking Modernist architecture in Complexity and Contradiction. He challenged Mies van der Rohe s dictum Less is more with Less is a bore and argued that architecture could be whatever the architect wanted it to be. He asserted that art and the architectural past, as well as life itself, are filled with complexity and contradiction, and buildings should be too. Instead of being pure, simple, and conventional, buildings should be complicated, rich, and filled with references to the past and to the present as well. Buildings should contain meanings, even if these are contradictory, as had been the case in Mannerist architecture (see page 592). And structures could be fun and humorous as well as serious. Venturi s idol was Louis Kahn, who was also based in Philadelphia and whose Modernist buildings, such as the National Assembly Building (see fig. 29.38) in Dacca, Bangladesh, are filled with overt historical references. Venturi admired Kahn s daring use of symbolism and historical layering. Venturi outraged the architectural world again in 1972, when he published Learning from Las Vegas with his wife, the architect Denise Scott Brown. The couple declared Los Angeles and Las Vegas to be the modern-day equivalents of ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence, and they proposed that the strip malls, neon signs, and highways of these American cities reflected contemporary needs and a new architectural language, one that should be embraced by architects. Venturi practiced what he preached. In 1962, he designed a house for his mother in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia (fig. 30.1). The structure resembles a Modernist abstraction of flat planes, strict geometry, clean lines, and a play of forms and spaces, notably in the enormous cleft in the center of the façade. But the house is also referential, for it is a parody of a conventional ROBERT VENTURI CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1077 (Item not available in eText) 30.1 Robert Venturi. Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. 1962. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. American home, complete with a slanted gable (the actual roof is much lower), a nineteenth-century pane-glass window, twentieth-century tract-house sliding-glass windows, a front porch, and behind that a large rectangular block that looks like a chimney but is not, since the real chimney, much smaller, pokes up out of it. Venturi then complicates the house with endless architectural references the cleft, for example, derives from Kahn s medievalcity buildings with slotted parapets and lintels embedded in the wall. The use of the lintel, which seems to support the two halves of the façade, combined with the opening of the porch, recalls an Egyptian pylon, while the broken segmental arch, functioning like a molding, brings to mind Pierre Lescot s Square Court at the Louvre (see fig. 18.2). Venturi has imbued the overscale house with humor, irony, and allusions, transforming the traditional American home into a rich architectural statement. The American architect whose name is perhaps most synonymous with Postmodern architecture is Michael Graves (b. 1934), who is based in Princeton, New Jersey. He rose to national attention in 1980 when he received a commission for the Public Services Building (fig. 30.2) in Portland, Oregon. The design is filled with paradox, as every element on the building s surface begs to be seen in several ways: flat and sculptural, representational and abstract, historical and modern. The form of the building is a Palladian cube sitting atop a platform, with the square or near-square motif echoed in the outline of the façade and in additional squares within (for example, the MICHAEL GRAVES 1078 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D enormous mirror-glass window, which encases a square defined by the maroon vertical piers). The individual windows are each 4 feet square. The wall can be read as a flat mural, a thin Modernist membrane stretched over the metal skeleton; but suddenly it becomes three-dimensional and sculptural, an effect heightened by the maroon-colored vertical shafts in front of the large mirror window. These mullionlike shafts become the fluting of pilasters, topped with bracket capitals, which support an enormous keystone above. Yet, if you read the keystone with the beige-colored wall, it becomes part of a flat arch framing the mirror window. The façade can even be described as anthropomorphic, for the pilasters and keystone can be read as a huge face, the capitals as eyes, and the pilasters as legs. The building has a whimsical sense of play, but it is also serious, recalling such great historical models as Palladio, Mannerism, and one of Graves s favorite predecessors, John Soane, who is reflected here in the sublime pilasters (see fig. 24.30). The enormous curtain-wall window, massive corner piers, and prominent pediment bring to mind Behrens s Turbinenfabrik (see fig. 27.35), not coincidentally one of the great Early Modernist buildings made just before Modernism abandoned all overt reference to the historical past. As subtle, complex, and difficult as Graves is the London architect James Stirling (1926 1992), as can be seen in his Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (fig. 30.3). This museum and theater complex is located on the side of a steep hill, with a highway at its base and a city street above. Like Kahn s National JAMES STIRLING 30.2 Michael Graves. Public Services Building, Portland, OR. 1980 82 30.3 James Stirling. Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. 1977 83 CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1079 ssembly Building, Stirling s bold massing of sim le forms and switchback ram s evoke ancient civilizations. Egy t es ecially comes to mind because of the large ylonlike forms and clefts that allow for narrow assageways. The attern of alternating sandstone and travertine suggests medieval Italian structures, while the enormous wavelik e w indow of the museum reverberates with memories of Paxton s Crystal Palace see fig. 25.39 and the great curtain-wall window in Behrens s Turbinenfabrik. iano, reminding us The curving w indow also suggests a grand of the building s function as a erformance hall. The ink and blue tubular railing and the blue I-beam su ort for the edimented museum entrance are i-Tech and industrial. The same can be said for the skeletal taxi stand, whose ferrovitreous construction is also reminiscent of Paxton, while its form recalls a Greek tem le. As in the work of enturi and Graves, all these familiar sources are seamlessly melded into a unified vision that brings the ast into the resent. The result is a building that is distinctly modern yet im arts a Kahn-like monumentality and aura of im ortance. A New Modernisms: High-Tech Architecture ate 1970s and 1980s Postmodernist architecture, with its historicism and symbolism, was im ortant for launching new architectural freedoms. Released from the narrow constraints of ure Modernism, architects were free to ex lore a new range of ossibilities that went well beyond the eclectic historical references of Postmodernism. acilitating and even encouraging artistic license w as the worldw ide economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s, when un recedented amounts of rivate and cor orate money oured into building rojects, dramatically energizing architecture and architectural vision. Just as New York real-estate develo ers in the 1920s had com eted to create the tallest building, so clients w orldwide now strove to erect the most s ectacular, exciting structure, one with international cachet. At every level, the ublic w as no longer settling for undistinguished generic Modernist buildings. Even the American stri malls of the 1980s were designed as Mediterranean minicities ictorian, Queen Anne, o ular styles as well , with many Tudor, and Romanesue were L 30.4 Richard Rogers and Reno Piano. entre National d rt et ulture Georges Pompidou, Paris. 1971 77 1080 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D o those built in earlier decades in a Modernist stle getting Postmodern acelits. Maor Postmodern architecture in the vein o enturi and Graves aded in the 1990s, suerseded b an ehilarating diversit that eanded architecture to a true Postmodernism, i e use the term in its broadest sense to mean luralism. Man architects no revisited Modernism, reinvigorating it ith the ne artistic license that had emerged during the late 1970s. n etreme version o this Ne Modernism is iech, hose buildings resemble oerul industrial machines. i!e Postmodern archi tecture, the most immediate roots o iech design can be ound in a e eamles in the 19"0s and 19#0s, one o the earliest being James Stirling s 19"9 # 3 $ngineering School in eicester, $ngland. Perha s the most amous rotot e or iech Modernism is the 1971 77 Po%idou &enter *ig. 30.4+ in Paris. here, architects Richard Rogers *b. 1933+ and Ren,o Piano instead o being buried *b. 1937+ eosed the building s utilities ithin the interior, the are dis laed on scaolding around the erimeter o hat is otherise a classical Modernist glass bo. $levators, escalators, and lumbing, electrical, and ventilation ducts are all rominentl dislaed as eterior ornament. Besides challenging architectural aesthetics, this device has the advantage o comletel oening u the interior sace, alloing or an necessar coniguration. B the late 1970s, iech Modernism had come to the ore, its arrival announced in art b the eeoing ong /ong and Shanghai Ban! */ SB+ *ig. 30.5+, designed in 1979 b Norman 0oster *b. 193"+ at a cost o 11 billion. ere as a s!scraer that did not loo! li!e a s!scraer. Gone is the grid o the tical oice toer, relaced b a comle structural aa ratus that loo!s li!e a machine. he building is comosed o our units, each consisting o our colossal iers that are ushed to either end o the rectangular building. Mammoth trussor! suorts are cantilevered rom these iers, and the loors then hang rom these cantilevers in ive stac!ed grous o si to nine villages. $levators sto loors each, grous that 0oster called onl on the communal loor o each village, and escalators then connect the remaining loors. ll the services, including elevators, are laced in slee! shats at either end o the building, alloing the interior to be virtuall ree o obstructions *ig. 30.6+. 0oster transormed the ground loor into a ia,,a, oening it u to the surrounding streets and leaving it unlevel since the streets the% selves are at dierent elevations. he ia,,a has an enormous curved ceiling, enetrated b escalators that ascend to a sectacu lar atrium, etending ten stories and 170 eet high, as seen in our reroduction, o hich are balconies o or!sace. On the south side o the building, comuterdriven mirrors, called sun scoos, trac! the sun and relect light onto a second set o NORMAN FOSTER 30.5 Norman 2oster. 4ong 8ong and Shanghai Ban9, 4ong 8ong, hina. 1979 8< : CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1081 Deconstructivism: Countering Modernist Authority In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition titled Deconstructivism. The show included seven architects whose work displayed a Constructivist geometry (see page 1003) and planarity that created an architecture of disruption, dislocation, deviation, and distortion, as Mark Wigley, who cocurated the exhibition with architect Philip Johnson, wrote in the accompanying catalogue. Originally the show was to have been called Violated Perfection, which would have spared everyone from struggling to determine what Deconstructivism actually is. The label caught on, however, with none of its advocates agreeing on a definition or even who the core Deconstructivists were. The show s curators derived the term from Derrida s theory of Deconstruction. Essentially, Derrida posits that there are no firm meanings to any written text; outside of the text there are infinite forces that continually restructure its meaning and provide endless readings and interpretations. Similarly, Deconstructivist architecture had no fixed meaning. Wigley linked architectural Deconstructivism with Russian Constructivism. This connection is based on style and not theory, since Constructivism was about establishing a new order and a utopian perfection, whereas Deconstructivism focused on denying any fixed structure or logic. 30.6 Norman Foster. Interior of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank mirrors that in turn direct it down into the piazza, which becomes filled with spectacular natural light strong enough to cast shadows. Inside and out, machines, mechanics, a megastructure of trusswork, rooftop maintenance hoists, and sleek service shafts define the building, giving it an appearance of industrial strength, efficiency, and functionalism. 1082 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 30.7 Coop Himmelblau. Rooftop Office, Vienna. 1983 88 Ironically, most of the architects in the show had no or little interest in Derrida, and if they did, it was through indirect associations rather than a reading of his abstruse writings. That said, a major trend emerged in the 1980s that challenged the idea that architecture had to adhere to any single concept or ideal. These architects rebelled against the notion that architecture had to aspire to some kind of perfection, order, or logic. forms may suggest Constructivist sculpture, but the design lacks the clarity, structure, and logic of the Russian movement. The project is devoid of historicist and architectural references. Replacing order and logic is a sense of slashing, thrusting, tilting, fragmentation, and skewing. Yet these attributes are not about destruction, demolition, dismantling, or disaster. Rather, the architects aspired to disrupt preconceived notions of architecture. Early advocates of this movement are Wolf Prix (b. 1942) and Helmut Swiczinsky (b. 1944), whose Viennese firm Coop Himmelblau was included in the 1988 Deconstructivism exhibition. Their aesthetic is prominently displayed in the rooftop conference room (fig. 30.7) they designed in 1983 for a law firm in Vienna. No explanation or logic can be applied to this architectural phenomenon, in which the roof seems to explode, creating a sense of catastrophe wholly at odds with the staid conservatism usually associated with the legal profession. Even the materials are jarring, conflicting violently with the nineteenth-century apartment building below. The planarity of the Zaha Hadid (b. 1950) is the one artist who is on everyone s list of Deconstructivist architects, although she has little interest in Derrida and claims her work is not based in theory, but instead is intuitive. Born in Iraq and trained and based in London, she was heavily influenced by the energized geometric forms of Suprematism (see pages 966 69). Hadid s projects generally show her concern for creating easily perceived fluid spaces that encourage people to come into and move about her structures. In the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (fig. 30.8), which opened in 2003, broad shifting Suprematist-like planes and Constructivist-like boxes move up COOP HIMMELBLAU ZAHA HADID 30.8 Zaha Hadid. Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati. Opened 2003 CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1083 and down and in and out on the museum s façade. Hadid describes the façade as an U=ban >arpet, and in fact, the sidewalk curves slowly upward into the building, encouraging people to enter. The ground floor is a landscaped lobby, serving as an enclosed park, further attracting visitors. It is dominated by a dramatic series of lobby ramps that run the length of the entire space. The ramps lead to a mezzanine that opens onto galleries. The galleries and their shapes are visible from the street, further enticing the public to enter the museum. Because the museum does not have a permanent collection and only mounts temporary exhibits, Hadid designed a wide range of spaces to accommodate all kinds of art objects. The galleries appear to be suspended in space, floating on a variety of levels. This sense of energized fluidity, not only within the museum but also in the relationship of the street and sidewalk with the building, is one of the hallmarks of Hadid s work. R A N @ B E H R D Frank Gehry (b. 1929) was also one of the seven architects included in the 1988 Deconstructivism show, but he views himself as an independent, refusing to be associated with any style or group. Nevertheless, his projects share with >oop Himmelblau s rooftop office a sense of disorder, fragmentation, and energy, as seen in his most famous project, the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (fig. 30.9). Its unique forms and vocabulary make it impossible to establish any specific meaning or architectural references. People have described the building s forms as a boat, a fish, and a blossoming flower Gehry s own description but ultimately the structure is an exploration of the abstract ? 30.9 Frank Gehry. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain. 1992 97 10RS P A RT I M T H E M O D ER N W O R L D sculptural play of enormous volumes, and it shows clearly the architect s pure delight in architectural freedom. The building s curvilinear masses are contrary to orthodox Deconstructivism, which emphasizes flat planes and angularity. Gehry designed their complex forms using computer technology, an integral tool in the fabrication of the building as well. (See Materials and Techniques, page 1085.) The museum even feels HiTech, for covering the steel skeleton is a thin skin made up of thousands of tiny titanium shingles. These shimmer in the light, changing color silver, blue, gold as the time of day or the weather changes. The interior is equally spectacular. A handful of conventional, rectilinear rooms containing modern art (that is, art made before 1960) contrast with large, irregularly shaped galleries that accommodate contemporary works. One such space is the so-called boat gallery, a long corridor created by two massive concave walls. Perhaps the most sensational area is the vast entrance atrium. >risscrossed by catwalks and lined with elevator cages, it contains spiraling ribbons of piers and opens up to a sea of windows and skylights. The Guggenheim, Bilbao is an example of the architectural diversity that had emerged by the end of the twentieth century, when all rules about design were suspended. As important, it reflects how architecture has moved beyond just being about designing buildings. Architects have, once again, begun to create prominent symbols for a city. From its conception, the museum was intended to be more than just a museumJ it was meant to change the image of this Spanish industrial port, giving it cultural cachet and transforming it into a tourist destination. That is MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES Computer-Aided Design in Architecture I n the early 1990s, architects began using CAD (computer-aided design) to create their buildings. In the paperless studio, plans were devel- oped using computer programs. This approach to design was initially quite controversial, since it forsook the age-old intuitive process of creating by putting hand to paper or modeling with wood or cardboard. Frank Gehry used a CAD program to produce the extremely complicated forms of the Guggenheim, Bilbao, and without this advanced technology, the structure and its titanium veneer probably would have been difficult to achieve, or at least the building would have been prohibitively expensive. The CAD program that Gehry, with his associate Him Glymph, selected is called CATIA, originally developed by Dessault Systems of France to digitally design and precisely produce extremely complicated products, such as airplane wings and fuselages for the French aerospace industry. Perhaps more important for Gehry and Glymph than facilitating the design, CATIA made the fabrication possible. Without CATIA, Gehry Computer-generated diagram of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain would have had to hand his plans over to artisans and workers, who then would have been challenged to translate them precisely into three-dimensional forms, a daunting if not impossible task. (Frank shaped window to each irregular titanium slate. CATIA also kept costs Lloyd Wright had tremendous difficulty finding a contractor willing to down. It no longer mattered that large segments of the building were build his highly irregular, organic Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in uniquely sized and shaped and therefore could not be cost-effectively New York.) Instead, Gehry and Glymph sent computer files to fabrica- mass-produced. The computer program could manufacture each tors, who fed the digitized information into computer-robotic equip- unique product with virtually the same expediency and cost as those ment that then manufactured the forms. Every detailed component of of a Modernist building that has thousands of uniform windows and the building could be produced this way, from each unique, oddly I-beams. precisely what happened: Gehry designed one of the seminal buildings of the twentieth century, a satellite of Frank Lloyd Wright s sensational 1950s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (see figs. I.16 and I.17), which it rivals in audacity and individuality. developing individual styles expressing a wide range of subjects in almost limitless mediums. Art s complexity now made it difficult to comfortably place an artist in a single category or hang a label on her or him. Among the many developments of the last 30 years are a revival of interest in painting and the ascendance of installation art, photography, and video as leading mediums. Among the more popular themes are racial, ethnic, and gender identity, a preoccupation with the body and death, and a Postmodern analysis, or Deconstruction, of how images and art take on meaning. But if there is anything that unites this period, it is the belief that Modernism with its authoritarian posturing is dead, and that the possibilities of what art can be and be about are limitless. POST-MINIMALISM AND PLURALISM: LIMITLESS POSSIBILITIES IN FINE ART Beginning in the late 1960s, the Post-Minimalists had rejected the austerity of Minimalism (see pages 1058 69) and once again returned the human figure, the artist s hand, subjectivity, and references back to art. The reaction to Minimalism was accompanied by the rise of a broad range of issues, styles, and mediums in the 1970s. During the 1980s, this pluralism began to gain widespread acceptance as it moved from marginalized art to the mainstream. At the same time, Postmodern theory provided a philosophical basis for pluralism, as it argued against all authoritative aesthetics and philosophical positions. The Modernist notion that one and only one style was correct and could move art forward at any given moment was dead. Indeed, if a single word could encapsulate the art made since the 1980s, it would be diverse. The art market, too, became truly global, with artists from every continent The Return of Painting Painting was back by 1980. Not that it had ever disappeared, but in the late 1960s and 1970s it had been overshadowed by Conceptual, Video, Performance, and Earth Art, for example. The Postmodern art critics of the late 1970s associated painting with Modernism and were talking about the death of painting, even though a stream of shows featuring the medium opened in London, New York, Germany, and Italy in the period. In the introduction to his book about painting s revival, The CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1085 International Trans-avantgarde (1982), critic Achille Bonito Oliva wrote, The dematerialization of the work and the impersonality of execution which characterized the art of the seventies, along strictly Duchampian lines, are being overcome by the reestablishment of manual skill through a pleasure of execution which brings the tradition of painting back into art. Another staunch advocate of painting, Christos Joachimides, in the introduction to the catalogue for his 1981 London show, A New Spirit in Painting, lauded the medium because now Subjectivity, the visionary, myth, suffering and grace have all been rehabilitated. The demand for painting was fueled by an explosion of personal and corporate wealth in the 1980s in America, western Europe, and Japan, especially driven in America by the takeovers and mergers encouraged by Reaganomics. As the recession of the 1970s and early 1980s ended, demand grew for art that could be bought and hung on a collector s wall or in a corporate lobby. The new type of painting that emerged came to be known as Neo-Expressionism, an appropriate label for works that are often both painterly and expressionistic, although not always, which makes the term problematic, along with the fact that the range of issues these artists deal with are quite broad in range and unrelated. The painting labeled Neo-Expressionist appeared first in Germany and Italy in the 1970s and then migrated to New York. In Germany, painters self-consciously recalled the Northern Romanticism and Expressionism so deeply ingrained in that nation s culture. Joseph Beuys (see page 1063), through his mystical performances, was the catalyst for this resurrection of the German past. Among the themes he and other artists began to explore was the legacy of Hitler s Third Reich. Among Beuys s students at the Düsseldorf Art Academy was Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Kiefer created images of mythical themes and epic scope that evoke centuries of German history, as seen in his enormous painting To the Unknown Painter (fig. 30.10). The picture explodes with the energy of flailed paint and the dramatic perspective of crop furrows rushing toward an eerie monumental tomb. Cold, bleak, and lifeless, this largely colorless image, except for shots of blood-red, seems to exude an atmosphere of death. Or does it? Crops lying fallow in the winter will be reborn in the spring, and the cycle of life continues. Kiefer s expressive use of paint and dramatic composition can be interpreted as a metaphor for the constant movement and forces of nature. Inspired by Beuys s use of symbolic objects, Kiefer often incorporated real materials into his paintings, imbuing them with a similar ritualistic magic. In this work, he embedded straw into the paint, and viewers could smell its scent for years. Nature is not just illustrated, it is physically present. The focus of the image is the tomb, a mausoleum for painters, as suggested by the title. We can assume the painters are German because the tomb is not painted but rendered in a large woodcut, ANSELM KIEFER 30.10 Anselm Kiefer, To the Unknown Painter. 1983. Oil, emulsions, woodcut, shellac, latex, and straw on canvas, 9'2" * 9' * 2" (2.79 * 2.79 * 0.05 m). The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Richard M. Scaife Fund; a. w. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund. 83.53 1086 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 30.11 Julian Schnabel, The Exile. 1980. Oil, antlers, gold pigment, and mixed media on wood, 90 * 120 x 246 8" (229 * 305 * 63 cm). Bischofberger Collection, Switzerland a medium associated with German art since being widely used by northern European artists during the Renaissance as well as by the Expressionists in the early twentieth century (see page 958). The bunkerlike shape suggests a shelter, and the isolated but wellanchored monument seems to be surrounded by the swirling forces of nature, representing not only the German mythical past but also the Romantic spirit that has driven German artists for centuries. We know from other works by Kiefer that these destructive forces are meant to symbolize Hitler s perversion of the German Romantic tradition, which he manipulated to serve his racist agenda and justify the suppression of avant-garde German artists, whom the Nazis labeled Degenerates (see page 1031). In a painting about national identity, Kiefer s Expressionist style and use of Romantic themes proclaim his place within the northern European Romantic tradition. He assures us that this tradition is once again in safe hands. With its wealth of symbols, metaphors, and overlapping and interlocking interpretations, the resulting image is varied and complex, reflecting the epic scale Kiefer covers and the mythical themes he evokes. S C H N A B E L The artist who became emblematic of Neo-Expressionism in America is Julian Schnabel (b. 1953), a New Yorker raised in Texas, where he went to the University of Houston. While today perhaps better known by the general public for his films, such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), Schnabel dominated the New York art world in the 1980s, or, as one critic put it, he created a bonfire over Manhattan, which he ignited with a 1981 exhibition that was so large it was held at both the Leo Castelli Gallery, the premier blue-chip gallery, and the JULIAN Mary Boone Gallery, the hottest new gallery in town. Everything about Schnabel was oversize, including his ego, reflected in such statements as I m the closest thing to Picasso. His paint surfaces are enormous, 16 feet in one direction not being unusual, and range from traditional canvas, to Kabuki backdrops, to tarpaulins, to animal skins, to the disreputable black velvet found in gasstation art. Often, his pictures are encased in extremely ornate and wide baroque frames. He covers his surfaces with violent, crudelooking, and dramatic slathers of paint, as well as with objects of all kinds, including broken crockery, for which he became especially renowned, the skeleton of a fir tree, and antlers, as seen here in his 1980 painting The Exile (fig. 30.11). Demonstrating a Postmodern penchant to raid the art of the past and present, as well as popular culture, his motifs are often appropriated, as is the figure holding a fruit basket in Exile, which was taken from a painting by Caravaggio. Despite the bombast, there is no point in trying to interpret Schnabel s picture, since there is no narrative to be found in the Caravaggio figure, the spool-like diagrammatic doll, the bearded man, the antlers, and the often odd trailings of paint. The inspiration for Schnabel s appropriation of objects and images that are juxtaposed in no particular narrative is Sigmar Polke (see fig. 29.17), whose work Schnabel saw in Europe in the 1970s. Like Polke, Schnabel s painting exudes a mood, rather than a story. In The Exile, we can sense the eruptive gestures and vitality of the artist locking horns with death, as evoked by the lifelessness of the appropriated figures and the sad, one-eyed doll, and, of course, the antlers themselves, the remains of once-living animals. As expressed by the artist, his paintings are icons that present life in terms of our death. Although he is Jewish, his CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1087 imagery is often Catholic, the crucified Christ being one favorite motif. While reflecting his personal experience as a student at a Catholic school in Brownsville, Texas, this kind of imagery is hardly spiritual, instead reinforcing a sense of physical suffering, loss, and isolation that haunts his baroque pictures. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT AND GRAFFITI ART Of the many American Neo-Expressionists to emerge in the 1980s, among the most exciting was Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 1988). Born in New York to a middle-class family, Basquiat s father was Haitian and his mother was of Puerto Rican descent. He dropped out of school at age 17, first writing poetry and then becoming a street artist using the tag name SAMO, suggesting the phrase same old. By studying art books, he became knowledgeable about art history and began painting. By the time he was 22, he had achieved international stardom. He died of a drug overdose at age 27. In Horn Players (fig. 30.12) of 1983, Basquiat combines both poetry and graffiti. More important, he draws upon the lessons of the pluralistic 1970s by brilliantly incorporating the era s strategies of using texts, making process art, working with narratives, and dealing with social politics, here racial identity. Basquiat also owes a debt to Abstract Expressionism, seen in his dynamic handling of paint, and to Pop Art, visible in his cartoonlike imagery and popular-culture references. Basquiat was prolific, working quickly and with the streamof-consciousness intensity sensed here. We can feel him painting, writing, crossing out. He draws us into the canvas by forcing us to read and piece it together. He makes us experience the sounds coming out of the saxophone, think about the repetition of words and the rhythms they make, and analyze his masterful use of color a brilliant pink and blue here, yellow and green there. Because they are so powerfully presented, we cannot dismiss Basquiat s use of words such as alchemy, a reference to the alchemy of jazz, ornithology, a nod to jazz musician Charlie Parker, nicknamed Bird, , and ear, an allusion to musical instinct. His works evoke the raw energy of the 1950s Beat poetry, improvisational jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. 30.12 Jean-Michel Basquiat, Horn Players. 1983. Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas, three panels, overall 8W * 6W5" (2.44 * 1.91 m). Broad Art Xoundation, Santa Monica, CA 1088 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D sweeping organic curve playing off a blue-gray Constructivist rectangle is the back of a spindleback chair. We then recognize the mostly gray rectangle as a painting hanging on a yellow wall. ]inally, the green anthropomorphic shape evolves into a table with collapsed legs. On the table lie a white form resembling a piece of paper and a disturbing biomorphic shape that recalls the skull in Munch s The Scream (see fig. 26.19). Tension dominates the image, symbolized by the collapsed table as well as the strident colors, the unfinished-looking paint handling, and the violent tilt of the floor. Even the shape of the painting is frenzied. Murray combines ten canvases, overlapping them and producing a ragged profile that transforms the painting into a wildly spinning pinwheel. Nothing seems to be anchored in this composition as objects shift like detritus adrift in a stormy sea. In her threedimensional, heaving paintings, Murray continually focuses on the psychological tension of daily life, the edgy reality that lies beneath the façade of domestic harmony. Because her work often deals with the psychology of the home as experienced from a woman s viewpoint, many critics place her within the context of feminist art. In any case, her work reflects the increasing interest in women s issues that characterize the 1980s. Sculpture 30.13 Elizabeth Murray, More Than You Know. 1983. Oil on ten canvases, 9_3" * 9_ * 8" (2.82 * 2.74 * 0.20 m). Estate of Elizabeth Murray. Courtesy PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York But 1980s hip-hop also comes to mind. Like Schnabel, Basquiat appropriates motifs, styles, and ideas from different periods a hallmark of Postermodernism. This approach allows him to create a powerful, sensuous experience as he shares his passionate feelings about the black musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, with whom he clearly identifies. Much of his work features African-American musicians, singers, and athletes, and is a reflection of the importance artists were increasingly giving to racial, ethnic, and gender identities, as will be discussed below. In 1978, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York mounted an exhibition of American artists entitled New Image Painting. The show not only claimed that painting was alive and well, it heralded the arrival of a new kind of painting, one that had representational objects embedded within seemingly abstract paintings. At the time, Elizabeth Murray (1940 2007) was producing totally abstract work and was not included in the exhibition. But within a few years, she had begun adding representational components to her abstractions. Because of their associations, these recognizable elements served as metaphors for a psychological state. Murray s evolution to referential abstraction can be seen in More Than You Know (fig. \0.1\) of 1983. At a glance, the painting appears to consist of entirely abstract shapes. But we soon realize that the ELIZABETH MURRA[ AND NEW IMAGE PAINTING The Post-Minimal aesthetic in sculpture, which combined the geometry of Minimalism with references and emotion that we saw in the work of Eva Hesse and Richard Serra (see pages 1058 59), continued unabated into the 1980s and 1990s. It could appear in such diverse forms as beautifully crafted, mysterious objects, as in the work of Martin Puryear, or readily understood public monuments, as in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin. One of the many outstanding sculptors who made objects rather than installations is Martin Puryear (b. 1941). Puryear fulfills in sculpture the reestablishment of manual skill through a pleasure of execution, as the critic Oliva had said about painting. After serving in the Peace Corps in the West African nation of Sierra Leone, studying printmaking and woodworking in Sweden, and visiting Japan, Puryear settled in Brooklyn in 1973, where he soon emerged, by the 1980s becoming a leading sculptor of his generation. One of the first things we notice in his 1985 wood and steel sculpture The Spell (fig. \0.14) is his craftsmanship. We marvel at the beauty of the curved shapes, the elegant tapering of the cone, the playful variety of its rectangular openings, and the sensuous texture of the flat, striated wood strips that make up the webbing of what looks like a basket. The allusion to basket making suggests crafts and craftsmanship, which in turn implies a human presence we sense the hand that carefully constructed this object, unlike Minimal Art, which seemed mass-produced and machine-made. We also sense Puryear s background not only in Africa, where he would have seen magnificently crafted utilitarian and ceremonial wooden objects, but also in Sweden, where he MARTIN PUR[EAR CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 108^ trained in woodworking, and in Japan, a culture with a long tradition of crafting wood into functional and decorative objects. `t would be a mistake, however, to interpret Puryear s references to African art as just an acknowledgment of his African-American background. His sculpture is generally not about ethnic identity and politics, although there are exceptions, but instead it reflects his broader experiences in diverse cultures well versed in using wood as an artistic medium. The Spell defies interpretation. aesembling a trap lying on the floor, the sculpture appears to be utilitarian but is not. bespite its title, suggestive of mystery and sorcery, there is nothing clearly ritualistic or shamanistic about the work. aather, we sense the essence of the wood itself, and therefore the sculpture evokes nature. Yet it is the human component the craftsmanship that prevails. Like Eva Hesse, but working in a radically different style, Puryear transforms the austerity of Minimalist geometry into an enigmatic yet warm organic object loaded with powerful human allusions. One of the best-known Post-Minimal sculptures of the 1980s is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (fig. 30.15) by Maya Lin (b. 1959). Lin received the commission while still a student in the architecture program at Yale cniversity. A daunting project because of the strong emotions and opinions surrounding the Vietnam dar, Lin s solution proved beautiful in its simplicity, ingenious in its neutrality, and sublime in its emotional impact. Lin presents MAYA LIN 30.14 Martin Puryear, The Spell. 1985. Pine, cedar, and steel, 4e8g * 7e * 5e5g (1.42 * 2.13 * 1.65 m). Collection of the artist. Courtesy of the McKee Gallery, New York 30.15 Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial. 1982. Two black granite walls, length of each 246e 9g (75m). The Mall, hashington, i .C. 1090 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D From an interview In these excerpts from a 1988 interview with Jeanne Siegel, Sherman discusses the role-playing in her photographs. CsNtY SHuvMAN: { still wanted to make a filmic sort of image, but { wanted to work alone. { reali|}d that { could make a picture of a character reacting to something outside the frame so that the viewer would assume another person. Actually, the moment that { reali|}d how to solve this problem was when ~obert Longo and { visited avid Salle, who had been working for some slea| detective maga|ne. Bored as { was, waiting for ~obert and avid to get their art talk over with, { noticed all these 8 by 10 glossies from the maga|ine which triggered something in me. ({ was never one to discuss issues after all, at that time the girlfriend. ) { was JEANNE SsEGEL: {n the ntitled ilm Stills, what was the influence of real film stars {t seems that you had a fascination with European stars. You mentioned Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, and Sophia Loren in some of your statements. hy were you attracted to them CS: { guess because they weren t glamori|}d like American starlets. hen { think of American actresses from the same period, { think of bleached blonde, bejeweled, and furred sex bombs. But, when { think of Jeanne Moreau and Sophia Loren, { think of more vulnerable, lower-class types of characters, more identifiable as workingclass women. At that time { was trying to emulate a lot of different types of characters. { didn t want to stick to just one. { d seen a lot of the movies that these women had been in but it wasn t so much that { the names of the dead and missing in action in a chronological list from 1959 to 1975. The names are etched into slabs of black granite that carve out a V-shaped gash in the earth. Viewers start reading from the left, representing the year 1959, where the first killed are listed and the granite rises out of the ground. The nameladen stone gradually rises along its 247-foot (75.2-m) length as more and more Americans die. The names keep coming, and the viewer soon becomes emotionally overwhelmed by their number. At its 10-foot peak, the granite turns at a 130-degree angle and then descends along another 247-foot length, with fewer soldiers listed as the 1973 withdrawal from Vietnam approaches. At the end, as the granite again disappears into the ground, many viewers are left with a feeling of existential nothingness. Adding to this sense of loss is the impact of the granite s polished surface, which acts like a mirror casting reflections of the living onto the names of the dead. This memorial is a sharp departure from traditional representational monuments to heroism, like l ude s La Marseillaise (see fig. 24.27), which glorified nationalistic spirit and dedication. nn a sense, the granite wall acts as an enormous tombstone. ohile the monument takes the form of Minimal sculpture, and like Minimal sculpture was manufactured, it has was inspired by the women as by the films themselves and the feelings in the films. JS: And what is the relationship between your ntitled ilm Stills and the real film stills CS: {n real publicity film stills from the 40s and 50s something usually sexycute is portrayed to get people to go see the movie. Or the woman could be shown screaming in terror to publicie a horror film. My favorite film images (where obviously my work took its inspiration) didn t have that. They re closer to my own work for that reason, because both are about a sort of brooding character caught between the potential violence and sex. However, { ve reali|ed it is a mistake to make that kind of literal connection because my work loses in the comparison. { think my characters are not quite taken in by their roles so that they couldn t really exist in any of their socalled films, which, next to a real still, looks unconvincing. They are too aware of the irony of their role and perhaps that s why many have pu||ed expressions. My stills were about the fakeness of role-playing as well as contempt for the domineering male audience who would mistakenly read the images as sexy. JS: Another critical issue attached to the work was the notion that the stereotypical view was exclusively determined by the male ga|}. id you see it only in this light or did it include the woman seeing herself as well CS: Because { m a woman { automatically assume other women would have an immediate identification with the roles. And { hoped men would feel empathy for the characters as well as shedding light on their role-playing. hat { didn t anticipate was that some people would assume that { was playing up to the male ga|}. { can understand the criticism of feminists who therefore assumed { was reinforcing the stereotype of woman as victim or as sex object. PRIMARY SOURCE Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) Source: Artwords, II, ed. Jeanne Siegel (NY: Da Capo Press, 1990). Copyright © 1988 by Jeanne Siegel. Reprinted by permission of Jeanne Siegel been transformed through references into a brilliant Postmodern monument of powerful emotions. APPROPRIATION ART: DECONSTRUCTING IMAGES hile painting and sculpture were exciting the art world in the first half of the 1980s and garnering the bulk of the attention, more and more artists came under the spell of Postmodern ideas. These artists turned to photography, video, film, billboards, and LEr (light-emitting diode) boards, that is, mediums associated with the mass media. larely did they make paintings, which were identified with Modernism, although Julian Schnabel s appropriated images that he put into a new context, thus changing their meaning, could just as easily be discussed in this section as under Neo-Expressionism. This new generation of artists began to deconstruct the visual world, exploring how images, which include three-dimensional objects, function largely to establish power, prestige, and value, but also demonstrating how objects take on meaning in general. This Postmodern questioning parsed o CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1091 image making, exposing hidden agendas or hierarchies, and demystifying the authority of the image. eminist theory especially propelled this Postmodernist art, as large numbers of women artist explored how women were presented in the media, and for whom. Photography and LED Signs While October magazine played a major role in introducing Postmodern theory to American artists, an exhibition titled Pictures, presented in 1977 at Artists Space, an alternative gallery in lower Manhattan, was also instrumental in bringing Postmodernism to the art world s attention. The art in the show consisted largely of pictures, both paintings and photographs, that were appropriations of preexisting images, thus demonstrating how all pictures, to varying degrees, are based on earlier art and calling into question such issues as originality, uniqueness, and authorship in art. Sherrie Levine, one of the artists in the exhibition, soon after became notorious for making photographs of photographs by such major male artists as Edward Weston and Walker Evans (see pages 1023 and 1029) and drawings of drawings by Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian (see pages 996 and 1005). Her copies, or re-presentations, called into question how art takes on value and the importance granted to the original artist, who, himself, was always borrowing from predecessors. In effect, Levine was declaring that no art was new. urthermore, Levine re-presented the work of men, her appropriations underlining the status accorded male artists. Not only did many of the early appropriation artists work in photography, but many, such as Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, and Laurie Simmons, were women, who often dealt with women s issues. By the end of the 1980s, Neo-Expressionism was on the wane, overtaken by Deconstruction, much of which was photography. If anyone knows how the mass media operates, it is Barbara Kruger (b. 1945), who has a background in graphic design at the magazines Mademoiselle and House and Garden. Kruger appropriates photographs from magazines, which she re-presents in gelatin silver prints, often quite large, with wording across the image, similar to the wording in advertising. Over the frontally presented head of an attractive woman, for example, she put Your body is a battleground, a reference to the abortion debate engulfing the nation in the 1980s as Jerry alwell s Moral Majority ramped up the attack on Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 supreme court decision upholding the right to abortion. Over the image of a stone sculpture bust of a woman seen in profile she placed Your gaze hits the side of my head, a reference to art being made specifically for the male gaze, as described in Jacques Lacan s psychoanalytic theories, with women being presented for male pleasure. This same theme is presented in Untitled (We Won t Play Nature to Your Culture) (fig. 30.16). The woman does not have the power of the gaze for she is blinded, not because she is stone, but here because her eyes are covered with leaves. By using words such as we and our versus you and your, BARBARA KRUGER 1092 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 30.16 Barbara Kruger, Untitled (We Won t Play Nature to Your Culture). 1983. Photograph, 73 * 49" (185 * 124 cm.) Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, NY Kruger sets up a dichotomy between the makermanipulator of the image on the one hand, and the targetmanipulated on the other. Besides the malefemale dichotomy, Kruger sets up a natureculture opposition, nature referring to the neutral state of nature, and culture to the two-dimensional visual image in which one person s agenda is imposed on another. Kruger s deconstruction not only reflects European Postmodernism, it is also driven by a dramatic increase in feminist theory in general, which appeared in such journals as Camera Obscura and Differences. The feminist movement also produced a journal specifically for feminist art, Heresies, started in 1976. The late 1970s and 1980s saw an enormous increase in women artists dealing with feminist issues. Among the most vociferous and effective was a collaborative called the Guerrilla Girls, founded in New York in 1985 and with cells throughout the United States. They produced printed matter, especially posters, and gave presentations, wearing gorilla masks, a feminist ploy meant to undermine the Modernist emphasis on the individual artist and shift focus to the issues. They especially spotlighted how women were marginalized by the art establishment. Among their more famous posters is one made in 1989 presenting Ingres s Grande Odalisque (see fig. 24.13) wearing a gorilla mask, above which is printed Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female. The Guerilla Girls are confrontational interventionists, taking their art out of the gallery and to the public by plastering their posters and billboards in public places, often around museums and galleries that they were viciously critiquing. Kruger as well on occasion has worked in the public domain, using billboards. CINDY SHERMAN AND THE UNTITLED FILM STILL While Kruger and the Gorilla Girls appropriate the propagandistic look and power of advertising, Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) focuses more on how film structures identity and sexuality. She is also interested in revealing how viewers impose meaning on images. Beginning in 1977, Sherman began a series called Untitled Film Stills, in which she photographed herself in situations that resemble stills from B movies. For each, she created a set and a female character that she played herself, wearing different clothes, wigs, and accouterments so that she is unrecognizable as the same person from one 10-by-8-inch still to the next. It is conceptually important that she is always the actress, for her metamorphosis represents the transformation women undergo subliminally as they conform to societal stereotypes reinforced, if not actually determined, by the mass media. In Untitled Film Still # 15, Sherman plays the sexy babe who seems to be anxiously awaiting the arrival of a date or lover (fig. 30.17). But is this really what is happening? Sherman leaves the viewer guessing. She may suggest a narrative, but in her untitled works, she never provides enough information to securely determine one. In effect, the story a viewer imagines says more about their own backgrounds, experiences, and attitudes than it does about the picture itself, which remains ambiguous. Her babe could very well be dressed for a costume party instead of a date, and her look of concern could be for something occurring on the street below. Innumerable stories can be spun from this image, taking into account such details as her cross pendant or the spindleback chair and exposed-brick wall, which seem to conflict with her youth and the lifestyle her clothing suggests. Remove any one of these motifs, and the story would change. Through what seems a simple strategy, Sherman brilliantly reveals the complex ways in which images become invested with meaning and how we are programmed by the media to interpret them. (See Primary Source, page 1091.) H O L Z E R A N D L E D B O A R D S Like Kruger and Sherman, Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) works in the very medium she wants to expose. For Holzer, the target is the advertising slogan that passes as truth. In 1977, she began writing what she calls truisms, which she printed on posters, flyers, T-shirts, and hats. Eventually, she moved on to electronic signs, even using the big electronic board in New York s Times Square in 1982. In the mid1980s, she began working with LED boards, the medium with which she is now most associated. Holzer s truisms were homespun aphorisms, one-liners that express a broad range of attitudes and biases, such as Murder has its sexual side, Raise boys and girls the same way, Any surplus is immoral, and Morality is for little people. In effect, she presents either side of the us versus you conflict exposed by Kruger, but the impact is the same. Her works provoke an awareness that one person is trying to impose a position on another. Holzer created the installation of truisms reproduced here (fig. 30.18) for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1989. LED boards run up the side of museum s spiral ramp, while below, arranged in a ritualistic circle, are benches with truisms etched on their seats. Wherever visitors turn, they are being talked to, and in a sense, manipulated, harangued, preached to, and controlled. Left unanswered, however, are such questions as: What is the truth? And who is talking, and for whom? JENNY 30.17 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #15. 1978. Gelatin silver print, 10 * 8" (25.4 * 20.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1093 30.18 Jenny Holzer, Untitled (selections from Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, The Living Series, The Survival Series, Under a Rock, Laments, and Child Text). 1989. Extended helical tricolor LED electronic display signboard, 16" * 162' * 6" (40.6 * 4,937.8 * 15.2 cm). Site-specific dimensions. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Partial gift of the artist, 1989. 89.3626 Context and Meaning in Art: The Institutional Critique and Art as Commodity Not all Postmodern artists deconstructed the mass media. Some, such as Fred Wilson, used appropriation to explore how museums control meaning and manipulate visitors, which we have already seen the Guerrilla Girls doing as well. Others, such as Jeff Koons, scavenged images from mass culture, especially nonart kitsch objects, and transformed them into high art. By putting the work in a high-art context, Koons demonstrates how art functions, how it differs from popular culture, and how taste is fashioned. THE INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE: FRED WILSON Fred Wilson (b. 1954) is a New York Conceptual artist who generally works with found objects that he puts into new contexts in order to reveal the hidden meanings or agendas of their previous uses. Or, as he himself said, I get everything that satisfies my soul from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things 1094 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D presented in the way I want to see them. He is especially renowned for deconstructing museums, that is, reinstalling collections to reveal how museums have an agenda when they present art and how the interpretation of this art can change when it is put into a new context. His most famous work is titled Mining the Museum (fig. 30.1 ), a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baltimore. For this project, Wilson mined the collection of the nearby Maryland Historical Society, pulling works out of storage that probably had not seen the light of day in decades, and then inserting them into existing installations, the new item creating a new context for the display and powerfully deconstructing the original objects. Wilson, for example, uncovered slave manacles in storage, which he then inserted in a case of fine silver. Silver pitchers, teapots, and goblets, which had been presented as examples of superb craftsmanship and design, were now seen as valuable commodities, their production and acquisition made possible by the proceeds of slave labor. The manacles also raised a second issue, which is that without the manacles, African Americans, who constitute as large portion of 30.19 Fred Wilson, Metal Work, 1793 1880, from Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. The Contemporary Museum and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, 4 April 1992 8 February 1993. Photograph courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York Baltimore s populace, would not be represented at all in the museum. The unadorned, painfully functional manacles sit in powerful contrast to the glistening polished silver, creating a new context that radically undermines the story formerly told by the historical society. ART AS COMMODITY: JEFF KOONS Unlike Wilson, Jeff Koons (b. 1955) makes objects, although he does not do the work himself, preferring to contract out the actual labor. But he likewise scavenges objects and images in order to explore the relationship of fine art, often sculpture, to mass culture. He is particularly interested in issues of taste and how art functions as a commodity. Despite making objects, Koons is basically a Conceptual artist, and the wealth of his ideas drives the diverse styles and mediums in which he works. He continuously pushes the limits of sculpture, creating objects that range from Hoover vacuum cleaners presented in Plexiglas boxes to stainless-steel train cars filled with bourbon based on actual Jim Beam train cars, and from a rabbit-shaped chrome balloon to a 43-foot-tall puppy made of flowers. Entirely different is the ceramic sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles (fig. 30.20) of 1988. Like a Warhol print, the sculpture was factory-produced, made to Koons s specifications in a limited edition by craftsmen in Italy. The image was not drawn or designed by the artist but rather chosen by him, in Duchampian fashion, from a publicity photograph of the singer with his pet chimpanzee, a process that on another occasion resulted in a copyright lawsuit against him. Its ornateness recalls seventeenthcentury Italian Baroque sculpture (see Chapter 19) and eighteenthcentury French porcelain, while the tawdry gold paint and rouged lips, along with the pop-culture imagery, give the work a crass look associated with mass-produced gift-shop figurines. Koons realized that by presenting his subject life-size, like a Classical sculpture of a Greek god, he was placing a mass-media image in the context of fine art, and giving it a new meaning. He transformed it from a kitsch souvenir into a compelling statement about what constitutes art, exploring the differences between fine art and low art. And because souvenirs are commodities, Koons reminds us that art, too, is merchandise. Again, with a hint of Warhol, Koons captures and parodies the glitz of celebrity promotion. But the tawdriness of the image and the porcelain medium give the sculpture a poignant sense of fragility and impermanence, suggesting (Item not available in eText) 30.20 Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles. 1988. Porcelain, 42 + 701*2 + 321*2" (107 + 179 + 83 cm). Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, New York CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1095 the temporary nature of life and fame. oons rolls the influences of Duchamp, Warhol, and Postmodern deconstruction into one package and updates it for the consumption-oriented 1980s. MULTICULTURALISM AND POLITICAL ART We have looked at red Wilson within the context of appropriation, deconstruction, and the institutional critique, but we could have just as easily incorporated him in a section devoted to racial identity. Part and parcel of the Postmodern 1980s is the tremendous surge in art dealing with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as a full range of social and economic issues. ading many artists was the adversarial position of the neoconservativism of Ronald Reagan s administration (1981 89) and erry alwell s oral ajority, founded in 199. Their extreme-right philosophy defeated the women s Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, sought to outlaw abortion, reduced funding for social welfare, and ignored the AIDS epidemic, which struck mostly gays, blacks, and Latinos. when they should have been attending school and who told the artist that the road to success lay in sports, not education. Hammons response was to design 40-foot-high basketball hoops decorated with wind chimes (which suggest native American spirit catchers meant to filter out bad dreams) and bottle caps, often associated with winos and thus wasted lives and arranged in colorful geometric patterns suggesting African motifs, designs, textiles, and beadwork. As stated in the title, the work is about setting realistic higher goals, such as getting an education, as opposed to unrealistic objectives, such as becoming a professional basketball player, as suggested by the unreachable 40-foothigh baskets. Its brightly decorated objects have a ritualistic, even totemic quality, and they raise the issue of what is to be revered and where ancestral spirit is to be placed. While clearly humorous, Hammons s works are extremely intellectual, although they communicate at a cool accessible level with the neighborhood and in the neighborhood. African-American Identity There are almost as many approaches to dealing with racial issues as there are artists. While red Wilson uses site-specific installation, others, like Lorna Simpson and Carrie-ae Weems, use photography with text, like ruger. In one of her best-known works, Cornered (1988), the Conceptual artist Adrien Piper used video installation. She barricaded a television monitor, draped in black cloth, in a corner of a room behind an upturned table. Above the monitor on the wall were two death certificates for her father, one describing him as white, the other as octoroon, that is, one-eight African-American. On the screen, Piper, well dressed and softly spoken, gives a 20-minute monologue describing how people become cornered due to stereotyping and labeling. Radically different is Conceptual artist David Hammons, whose work is often imbued with humor and takes place in the community. In contrast again, ara Walker s cut-paper silhouette wall drawings are charged with horror, exposing the conflicting feelings of hatred, lust, sadism, and fascination that lie beneath racial tensions. HAMMONS Emerging in the late 1960s, David Hammons (b. 1943) is a wonderfully quirky Conceptual artist who, for most of his career, shunned showing in prestigious galleries (he does now), often presenting his art surreptitiously in New York shops owned by friends, where customers would chance upon it while looking at the store s regular nonart merchandise. Or he creates work specifically for African-American communities, as is the case with Higher Goals (fig. 30.21) of 1982, originally installed in his Harlem neighborhood and here photographed at a Brooklyn site. The sculpture was provoked by a group of neighborhood teenagers, who were playing basketball DAVID 1096 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D 30.21 David Hammons, Higher Goals. 1982. Wood poles, basketball hoops, bottle caps, and other objects, height 40 (12.19 m). Shown installed in Brooklyn, New York, 1986 W A L K E R Among the most sensational, and perhaps the most controversial, African-American artists to appear in recent years is Kara Walker (b. 1969), who emerged in 1994 fresh out of the M..A. program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Heavily influenced by her readings of such black feminist writers as Michele Wallace, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison, and especially the latter s Tar Baby, Walker found her subject matter in African-American history and, often, in her feelings as a black woman living in racist America. Simultaneously, her research led her to nineteenth-century silhouette portraits, simple black cut-paper silhouettes of the sitter, made by privileged white girls as part of their education and by itinerant portraitists for clients who could not afford full-blown portraits, whether on paper or canvas. Walker exploded onto the New York art world in 1994 with a 13-by-50-foot installation of life-size black cutouts titled Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War As It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, presented at the Drawing Center, a not-for-profit space. The scene is set in the antebellum South, filled with moss-laden oaks that frame such vignettes as white lovers leaning together to kiss, a small male slave mysteriously strangling a bird that appears to emerge from the opened legs of a female slave while the sword of a white gentleman appears to pierce the backside of the boy, and a slave girl performing fellatio on a white man. By 2000, Walker was adding projected silhouettes and colored lighting to her cut-paper installations, as can be seen in Insurrection (Our Tools Were KARA Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On) (fig. 30.22), containing such lurid or unseemly events as a plantation owner surreptitiously propositioning a naked female slave behind a tree, a group of whites torturing a black, and a female slave, with a tiny baby on her head, trying to escape a lynching. Everything is exaggerated and caricatured, playing to stereotypes many of the figures in her works are outright grotesques, having, for example, four legs or giant phalluses, thus hammering home the perversion and abnormality driving the emotions in her anecdotal, chimerical world. The cut paper is executed in unmitigated black, and the scene has the quality of a dream, actually a nightmare, its sense of violence, hysteria, and horror pushed to a feverish pitch by Walker s contours, which are jagged, spiky, and erupting with piercing swordor daggerlike projections. This simple, detailless, flat, dark world seems to penetrate beneath the visual overload and superficiality of the fact-filled real world to expose the essence of human relations a frightening psychological realm where the basic human urges and emotions of sex, desire, hatred, cruelty, love, sodomy, masochism, bestiality, castration, murder, and lust are played out. Walker s world is not just that of the antebellum South, it is also the world of today, where fraught race relations still plague American society and racial, ethnic, and religious conflict steeps the world in perpetual conflict. or besides giving Insurrection an oneiric quality, the projections pull Walker s antebellum scene into the present, for the light casts shadows of the viewers on the wall, thereby integrating the present, us, into Walker s nightmare and making us complicit in this horrific timeless occurrence. Kara Walker, Insurrection (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On). 2000. Cut paper silhouettes 0.22 and light projections, dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director s Council and Executive Committee Members, 2000. 200.68 CHAP ER 0 H E PO S MODERN ERA: AR SIN CE 1980 1097 The AIDS Pandemic and a Preoccupation with the Body One of the most embattled fronts in the 1980s artistic war with right-wing politics was the struggle to bring about government support to deal with the AIDS epidemic, a disease of the immune system first identified in 1981 that to date has affected over 33 million people worldwide. Triggered by ACT-UP, the acronym for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, artists, many gay, began making art dealing with the crisis of thousands of people dying while the government did nothing. Much of the art was made by groups, such as Gran ury and Group Material, these collaborative artists being a reflection of the Postmodern rejection of the importance placed on the individual in the production of art. Gran ury, a spin-off of ACT-UP, its name taken from the Plymouth automobile used by the then-repressive New York Police Department, made posters, such as the 1988 The Government Has Blood on Its Hands, the bold type of the title appearing above and below a large blood-red handprint. A I D S C R I S I S : F E L I X G O N Z A L E Z - T O R R E S elix Gonzalez-Torres (1957 1996), a founding member of the collaborative Group Material in 1980, produced some of the most powerful AIDS-related art, although his work encompasses a wide range of social issues. Gonzalez-Torres, who was born in Cuba and came to lorida in the 1981 in the mass-exodus called the Mariel boatlift, can best be described as a Conceptual artist working in a Minimalist mode. He is the quintessential Postmodern artist, since his art is issue-drive and seemingly oblivious to the concept of style. His mediums include, for example, two identical wall clocks hung side by side, which can be viewed as lovers who fade and die as the batteries wear out a string of lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, the lights evoking tears, or even souls, and like the clocks, eventually burning out and a pile of brightly wrapped candy, the weight of the artist s lover, which visitors may take and eat, the gradual disappearance of the candy reflecting, among other things, the lover s body being consumed by AIDS. Like so many artists of the 1980s, Gonzalez-Torres took his work out of a specifically art context and into the public domain. As part of a 1991 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he arranged for a black-and-white photograph of an empty, unmade bed, in which two people had slept, to be installed on 24 billboards around the city (fig. 30.23). A classic Postmodern picture, it was highly suggestive and subject to broad interpretation. Despite being devoid of text, the simple image of an unmade bed spoke volumes. It conjured thoughts of intimacy, relationships, and love, as well as of loss, absence, and death. or some viewers, the image of the empty bed evoked the thousands of men, women, and children who had become victims of the AIDS epidemic, creating public awareness and discussion of the disease. In contrast to the overt propaganda of Gran ury, GonzalezTorres s work is poetic and understated. Gonzalez-Torres died of AIDS at the age of 38. THE A ¡elix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (billboard of an empty unmade 0.2 bed). 1991. Billboard, overall dimensions vary with installation. The ¡elix Gonzalez-Torres ¡oundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Museum of Modern Art, New York 1098 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D PREOCCUPATION WITH THE BODY: KIKI SMITH The death and suffering of AIDS victims brought about a new awareness of the body, especially its vulnerability and frailty. One artist to explore the vincibility of the body and the brevity of life is New Yorker Kiki Smith (b. 1954). In the 1980s, she created a work consisting of eight identical jars of blood, and another presenting silver-coated watercooler bottles etched with the names of bodily fluids such as tears, milk, saliva, vomit, semen, urine, and sweat that a viewer is led to believe is in the jars. Because these works contain repeated elements, they resemble Minimal Art. Yet the Conceptual component the thoughts we have when confronting any of these bodily fluids packs a powerful, visceral 30.¥¦ Kiki Smith, Untitled. 1990. Beeswax and micro-crystalline wax figures on metal stands, female figure installed height 6§415*16" (1.95 m). Collection Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture committee. 91.13 (a d) response and emotional punch. Smith has reduced existence to an elemental essence, stripping away individuality and uniqueness to reveal the basic elements of life. Toward 1990, Smith began constructing entire figures, usually using such impermanent materials as paper, papier-¢£ché, and wax, which served as a metaphor for the fragility of the body and the transience of life. In the untitled 1990 work reproduced here (fig. 30.24), Smith cleverly revives the Classical tradition of the nude figure. However, we are viewing neither Greek gods and goddesses nor heroic athletes and soldiers. Rather, Smith portrays flesh-and-blood mortals. The woman oozes milk from her breast and the man semen from his penis, attributes of nourishment, procreation, and life. But death prevails, seen in the form of the limp figures slumped on their poles and the repulsive discoloration of the skin. Smith presents the entire life cycle, but it is the sadness of deterioration and our ultimate fate of death that prevail. THE FUTILITY OF PRESERVING LIFE: DAMIEN HIRST One of the most powerful statements about death, decay, and impermanence comes from the British artist Damien Hirst (b. 1965). Hirst, who has a flamboyant personality and is often accused of being a publicity hound, headed a group of London artists who came to the fore in 1988, when Hirst organized a student exhibition entitled Freeze in a London warehouse. The group created a public sensation and a critical storm due to their outrageous subject matter. Their imagery got even more outrageous in the 1990s, highlighted by Hirst s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, consisting of a dead shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde and shown in a 1992 Saatchi Gallery exhibition titled Young British Artists. The show also included Hirst s 1990 One Thousand Years, a glass case filled with flies and maggots feeding off a rotting cow s head. In addition, Hirst has made beautiful, ethereal paintings incorporating dead butterflies and abstractions using dead flies stuck to an enormous canvas. In Mother and Child Divided (fig. 30.25), shown at the ¤enice Biennale in 1993, a cow and a calf, each divided in two, float in four tanks of formaldehyde. Using a Minimalist seriality, Hirst placed the bisected cows into identical tanks, thus creating a feeling of scientific objectivity. Even the nearly identical halves of each cow are multiples, that is, a repetition of the same form. The Minimalist tanks function as frames, the cow and calf as realist pictures. The beauty and repulsiveness of this daring ¨©ª«¬® ¯ 0 ¬© «° ±¬ ²° ³ ®´ ®ªµ ª®¬ ±¶´¨ 1·¸ 0 1099 30.ÇÈ Damien Hirst, Mother and Child DiÉided. 1993. Steel, GRP composites, glass, silicone, cow, calf, and formaldehyde solution, two tanks at 74Ê*Ë + 126Ê*Ë + 43" (190 + 322 + 109 cm) and two tanks at 401*Ë + 661*2 + 24Ì*Ë" (102.5 + 169 + 62.5 cm). Astrup Íearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst presentation is fascinating. And because we are looking at real objects, we are literally confronting death, which is a powerful experience. We are also witnessing a vain attempt to prolong the physical existence of the animals. An especially poignant aspect of this work is the separation of mother from calf, a reminder of the life that once was and the emotional attachment of mother and child. While Hirst s subject matter may seem sensational, the animals he displays in formaldehyde tanks are powerful and unforgettable metaphors of life and death. exploding to new heights again in the 1990s. Not only did all three art forms become more popular, they got bigger, more sophisticated, and more refined, moving away from the more experimental, tentative, or temporary look of these mediums in the 1960s and 1970s. And now artists often worked primarily in these mediums, not being part-time practitioners as before. And like art in the Postmodern era, the work often drew heavily on earlier styles and historical periods, and showed no fear of being anecdotal, often having elaborate narratives as opposed to being abstract. he Po er of nstallation Large Scale Photography ILYA ¹ º » ideo and ¼ ½ ¼ ¾ As we saw in the last chapter, installation art had existed since the late 1950s, when introduced by Alan Kaprow and called Environments. And by the early 1960s, we saw Robert Whitman integrating film into installation, thus anticipating video installation, and Nam June Paik taking a lead role in popularizing ¿ideo Art. At the same time, avant-garde artists, such as Joseph Kosuth, redefined photography, using the medium on a large scale and integrating it with other mediums. But in the 1980s, installation, video, and large-scale photography entered a new stage, their popularity 1100 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N Æ ORLD Of the legions of installation artists who ÀAÁAÀOV emerged in the 1980s, one of the most engaging is the Russian Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933), who emigrated from Moscow to New York in 1988. In Russia from 1981 to 1988, he made a series of rooms he called Âen Characters that replicated the types of seedy communal apartments assigned to people by the Russian state under the Communist regime. Each was inhabited by an imaginary person with an unusual idea, one all-absorbing passion belonging to him alone. One spectacular cubicle was Âhe Man Who ÃleÄ into Space from His Åpartment (fig. 30.26). We see the room after its occupant has achieved his dream of being ejected into outer space, hurled through the ceiling from a catapult suspended by springs 30.26 Ilya Îabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, from Ten Characters. 1981 88. ixed-media installation, life-size Ï CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1101 PRIMARY SOURCE Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933) On installations Kabakov discusses his installations entitled Ten Rooms, which deal with life in Soviet Russia. He especially emphasizes the importance of the space in his installations, claiming the rooms have a spirit that establishes the mood and meaning of the work. H ow does this spirit of the place seize you? In the first place, the rooms are always deconstructive, asymmetrical to the point of absurdity or, on the contrary, insanely symmetrical. In the second place, they look dull, oppressing, semidark, but this is not so because the windows are small or weak lamps are on. The main thing is the light both during the day and at night is arranged so excruciatingly, so awkwardly that it creates a peculiar discomfort distinctive to that place alone. The third important feature of our rooms effect is their wretched, ridiculous preparation from the planning stage to the realization: everything is crooked, unfinished, full of stains, cracks; even in the most durable materials, there is something temporary, strange, made haphazardly, just to pass. What is especially depressing is the fact that everything is old, but at the same time it isn t clear when it was made, it doesn t have all the and alluding to the space race between the U.S. and Russia. Like the other rooms, this one is accompanied by a grim story, worthy of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. The text, the collapsed ceiling, limp sling, and clutter become a tableau of life in Communist Russia, where claustrophobic squalor has brought about a hopeless delusional state, and flights of fantasy are the only escape from the drudgery of daily life. The ruin we are witnessing in The Man Who Flew into Space is not just the devastation of one man s life, but rather the shattered dream of the utopia in which Tatlin, the Constructivists, the Dadaists, and the Communist world in general had so firmly believed. Kabakov s installation is presented as a relic of an actual event, and like any relic, it possesses a powerful aura, almost impossible to achieve in conventional painting and sculpture. (See Primary Source, above.) An especially popular form of installation is video or film installation. Among the best-known video artists is Bill Viola (b. 1951), who was also one of the first to specialize in video, coming at the tail end of the first generation of video artists. He started working with the medium in the 1970s after graduating from Syracuse University, his earliest work being primarily singlechannel video presented on a television monitor. By the early 1980s, he was projecting video onto large walls and incorporating BILL VIOLA 30.27 Bill Viola, The Crossing. 1996. Video/sound installation with two channels of color video projected onto 6-foot-high (1.83 m) screens, 101*2 minutes. View of one screen at 1997 installation at Grand Central Market, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Artist 1102 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D noble patina of time, the marks of wonderful days of old ; it is old in the sense of being decrepit and useless. All of this is despite the fact that it might have been made and painted only yesterday it already appears outdated, marked for disposal. There is an impression of dust and dirt in every place and in everything on the walls, at the ceiling, on the floor, in the corners. But the sensation is even stronger that these rooms, including private apartments, do not belong to anyone, that they are no-one s and that, in essence, no-one cares in the least about them. No-one loves them, people live in them temporarily and will leave not remembering them at all, like a train station, an underground crosswalk or a toilet at the bus station. Sociality, being completely interlinked, was the natural means of survival, the very same traditional Russian commune which later also entered Soviet reality, in which you as a voluntary or subordinated participant were forever drowned, dissolved. But on the other hand, the commune saved you, supported you, didn t let you disappear or perish in loneliness, in despair, in a state of material or moral neglect. Every second of your life, you belonged to some kind of community .The atmosphere of the surrounding space was, in essence, its spirit. And you caught this spirit immediately, all you had to do was to enter this or that space. Source: Ilya Kabakov, The Text as the Basis of Visual Expression, ed. Zdenek Felix (Cologne: Oktagon, 2000) it into installations or environments containing real objects. Although Viola s work does not always have a clear sequential narrative, it always has a theme, usually an unsettling, intense questioning of the meaning of existence that in part is brought about through intense sensory experience for a viewer. and simplest video projections Ðne of Viola s best-known is The Crossing (fig. 30.27). In two simultaneous, approximately ten-minute projections, shown side by side, or on either side of a single screen, a plainly dressed man approaches from the distance, passing through an empty, darkened space and stopping when his body, now nearly 1Ñ feet tall, fills the screen. In one projection, water begins to drip on him, eventually becoming a deluge that washes him away. In the other, a small fire erupts at his feet, increasingly swelling into a bonfire that ultimately consumes him. The projections end with water hauntingly dripping in one, and a fire mysteriously smoldering in the other. Both videos are accompanied by a deafening soundtrack of pouring water and crackling fire, which intensifies the force of the imagery and heightens its visceral impact. Viola s elemental symbols of fire and water seem to have destroyed the figure. Ðr perhaps the two forces have brought about a transformative process, as the body dissolves into a spiritual state, crossing into a higher reality and becoming one with the unseen universal forces. We do not know. The video relentlessly instills a sense of the physical and sensory, and then suddenly leaves us in an existential void. Viola s work is a quest for the spiritual, reflecting the influence of Òen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Viola summed up the thrust of much of his work when he said, And those two realizations: that you are connected deeply to the entire cosmos and at the same time you are mortal and you are fragile and inconsequentialÓ the search for meaning that human beings have been engaged with since the beginning of time is part of the reconciliation of those two things. LARGE-SCALE PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDREAS GURSKY As we have already seen when discussing Ôoseph Õosuth in the last chapter (see page 106Ñ), photography underwent a dramatic change beginning in the late 1960s as the medium was appropriated by visual artists who, because they were not trained as photographers, broke all of photography s traditions. These new photographers worked on a large scale, often did not take their own photographs, generally did not print their own work, and occasionally integrated photography into other mediums. Beginning in the 1980s, large-scale photography entered a new stage. For one thing, by the end of the 1980s, it became more prevalent, to the point that it may very well have superseded painting for the art world s attention. Second, it got bigger, with more and more artists working on a larger and larger scale. Cindy Sherman and Barbara Õruger, for example, made 6- and 8-foot pictures, while the Canadian Ôeff Wall worked on a billboard scale, backlighting his images, which were transparencies in lightboxes. And third, it was increasingly being made by artists for whom it was their primary medium. Düsseldorf especially produced a large number of major photographers, mainly due to the 30.28 Andreas Gursky, Shanghai. Ù000. Chromogenic color print, 9Ú11*16Û + 6Ú91*2Û ÜÙ.80 + Ù.00 m). Courtesy: Monika SpruethÝPhilomene Magers, Cologne innovative black-and-white photography of Bernd (1931 Ñ007) and Öílla (b. 193×) Becher, and because Bernd, like Ôoseph Beuys, taught at the Art Academy. Becher s students included such renowned photographers as Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Ööffer, and Elger Esser. They also included Andreas Gursky (b. 1955). We can get a sense of his scale from his Ñ000 Chromogenic color print Shanghai (fig 30.28), which is over 91 Ø feet high. Looking at this work, we get the impression that Gursky has an exceptional eye that has allowed him to discover remarkable compositions in the real world. Öere, as in so many of his works, he seems to have discovered a wonderful geometry, which gives his image the look of Minimalist Art (see page 1056), yet another example of a Postmodern appropriation of an earlier style. But in fact he has digitally manipulated his images sharpening lines, emphasizing certain colors while suppressing others, heightening value contrasts or minimizing them, and, on occasion, removing CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1103 THE ART HISTORIAN S LENS The Changing Art Market T he world of contemporary art is as complex and varied as the art order to draw international attention to Pittsburgh. Both the Venice itself. Museums, commercial galleries, private dealers, auction Biennale and the Carnegie International, however, only gained their houses, art fairs, international exhibitions, collectors from all strata of current prestige after World War II, when they were joined by other society, critics, curators, art historians, books, and a vast mass media major international shows, such as the Documenta in Kassel, Germany, that includes the Internet are some of the pieces that form the kalei- which is held every four years, and the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil. In doscopic art market of the twenty-first century. the last few decades, many other international biennials have joined How different this conglomerate of influences is from the late the art scene, including those in Istanbul, Havana, Cairo, and medieval and Early Renaissance world that was largely defined by Johannesburg. A major venue for American artists has been New artists guilds, the apprentice system, and a patronage system domi- York s Whitney Museum of American Art, which was founded in 1930 nated by aristocrats and the Church. The rise of academies in the six- and has always held an annual or biennial exhibition. teenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the French Royal Despite the excitement generated by fairs and galleries, however, Academy in 1648, marked a shift of power to the academy system and contemporary art has largely lived in the shadow of Old Masters and its accompanying exhibitions (called Salons in Paris) which showcased Impressionism, and, as the twentieth century progressed, early the work of members and students. Historians published the first European Modernism. It was not until the 1970s that contemporary art books on artists during this period. The eighteenth century witnessed became fashionable. Triggering the stampede to buy work by living the rise of prominent art auctions in Paris and London, the opening of artists was the sensationally successful auction of the Pop Art collec- the first public art museums in those cities, and the beginning of what tion of Robert and Ethel Scull at Sotheby s in New York in 1973. Such many consider to be the first art criticism (see pages 811 12). In the major auction houses as Sotheby s and Christie s, both dating to eigh- nineteenth century, the French Salon changed from a members exhi- teenth-century London, had long sold contemporary art, but in small bition into an open show that was juried and that presented hundreds quantities and with little fanfare. But after the Scull auction, countless of artists and thousands of works. Artists from all over Europe and the collectors rushed into the contemporary arena, and in the last 25 Americas aspired to exhibit at the Paris Salon, which, although domi- years, auctions of contemporary art have shared the limelight with nated by the French, in effect became the first international showcase sales of Impressionism and European Modernism. This collecting fever and an important venue for attracting patrons and commercial spurred the appearance of numerous international art fairs, including success. By the end of the nineteenth century, art dealers, who had vir- Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland; Art Basel Miami in Miami Beach; the tually always been around, became a major force in the art world, Frieze Art Fair in London; the Armory Show in New York; and the Foire especially in Paris. Internationale d Art Contemporain or FIAC (International Fair of Today, one of the strongest influences on an artist s career is repre- Contemporary Art) in Paris. Every year, these high-end art fairs are sentation by a prestigious dealer with a reputation for selecting flooded with tens of thousands of collectors and visitors scouting for important artists. Also significant is exhibiting and being collected new work and new artists. by major museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Gallery in London, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. These are just a few of the many museums known for presenting prestigious exhibitions and collecting contemporary art. Artists also aspire to be included in the big international exhibitions, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteenth-century French Salons, although the artists are generally invited (Item not available in eText) by curators and do not submit work to a jury. One of the oldest international exhibitions is the Venice Biennale, established in 1903 and located in a park in Venice. Today, the show occurs once every two years and takes place in permanent pavilions owned by the various countries which present their own artists. Such international shows were often conceived to promote the host cities and to encourage their economic development. For example, Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in 1895, and the following year 1104 he established what is now known as the Carnegie International in International Art Fair. Art/Basel/Miami Beach/1 objects. In some respects, he colors and draws like a painter. And his extremely realistic-looking images, which haÞe to be fact since after all they are photographs, are a deconstruction of photography since they serve as evidence of how all images are artificial and reflect what Derrida would describe as one person s hierarchy. If it were not for the title, Shanghai, we would have no idea where Gursky s photograph was shot, for there is nothing to give PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D ß /Dec/05 30.29 El Anatsui, Dòesi óó. ô006. Aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire, 9õ9÷ * 16õ3÷ * 8÷ øô.97 * ù.95 * 0.ô0 m). Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Akron úhio. Courtesy Artist and ûack Shainman Gallery, New York this building a sense of place. And that is the point. From a deconstruction standpoint, the title is in a sense an integral part of the visual work, underscoring how the title affects meaning. As social commentary, the work points up how global all cultures have become. Gursky travels the world to acquire his images, photographing such motifs as hotel lobbies, stock exchanges, office towers, department stores, and crowds at rock concerts: The latter, instead of appearing Minimalist, have the allover look of a àackson Pollock painting, another stylistic appropriation. In every instance, if it were not for the title, we would be clueless not only about the locale but even the nation or hemisphere featured in Gursky s highly objective and unemotional images, which suggest how homogeneous the world has become. GLOBAL ART The closing decade of the twentieth century marked the rise of a world art. With the arrival of the Internet and satellite communications, artists in even the most remote areas no longer operate in isolation. More artists than ever have access to what is being produced in New York, London, Paris, Dásseldorf, Beijing, and Tokyo. àet travel circulates artists from âorea to Cairo, from àohannesburg to São Paulo, and from Basel to Dubai, for exhibitions and art fairs. (See ähe årt Historian s Lens, page 110æ.) The entire world is artistically bound together, transforming it into one large art gallery and making it nearly impossible to talk about art in one hemisphere without talking about developments occurring everywhere else. Now, artists worldwide use the same art language, deal with similar issues, and avidly follow each other s work. Many critics predicted that the rise of a global art world would result in a global art, art that is basically homogeneous. But this is hardly the case. Since Postmodernism emphasizes issues and not style, artists often make work that is very personal and that reflects their personal experience. As we have seen, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, politics, and economics have been dominant themes in Western culture since the 1980s, and the same holds true worldwide, with contemporary art from Lebanon, Vietnam, India, Iran, and Colombia, for example, embracing issues specific to these countries. èr, as expressed by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, Art is something that is environment-based. It takes its roots from a certain soil. El natsui din ra Signs and Postmodern mbiguity é ê é ë ê é El Anatsui (b. 19ææ) was born in Ghana, and studied art at the niversity of Science and Technology in âumasi, his education focusing on contemporary art, largely made in a formalist, Modernist tradition. In 1975, he began teaching at the ìniversity of Nigeria in Nsukka, where he lives today. Initially working in clay and wood and reflecting traditional Ghanaian and Nigerian art and themes, he now works with the flattened metal caps and bottleneck foil of liquor bottles, weaving this metal together with copper wire to create what look like enormous, luxurious tapestries or fabrics. These brightly colored aluminum mosaics, such as Dîesi ïï (fig. 30.29), evoke Nigerian and Ghanaian textiles and designs, the hard metal being visually transformed into something soft. For Anatsui, these caps are a reminder of the liquor that European traders brought to Africa as barter and therefore could be seen as a reference to trade, commodity, and even the beginning of globalization. The artist has also said that metals and liquor in many cultures, especially African, have this association with the spiritual, with healing. ðust think about the many ways a hand must open metal caps to pour out schnapps for prayers and libations. In Dîesi ïï, the protrusion of concentric circles placed within a square suggests something ritualistic. According to the artist, this form came about with thoughts about the zero sign, 0ñ which can mean a lot or nothing. And I think is a kind of harking to Adinkra symbols I had worked with earlier. Adinkra, which ì CHAP TER 30 TH E PO STMODERN ERA: ART SIN CE 1980 1105 translates as saying farewell, are West African symbols, printed on fabric originally worn at funerals, although they have wider uses now. The symbols encapsulate aphorisms that help mourners meditate on life, and the concentric circles, according to Antasui, are the king of these signs, the most conspicuous and attentiongrabbing, which I think has focus-inducing properties. The central zero is thus a form upon which to mediate. And it is also a Postmodern void to which viewers can assign meaning. Not only does the meaning of the work have a Postmodern ambiguity, but so does the form of the sculpture itself. ýor travel, the artist folds these enormous reliefs until they are small enough to fit into a boxþ when unfurled, they do not automatically resume their original shape, allowing curators and collectors in the artist s absence, and with his blessing, to restructure the work, implementing what Anastui calls a nomadic aesthetic. Cai Guo-Qiang: Projects for Extraterrestrials It seems only fitting to end this book with Cai ÿGo-Qiang (b. 1957), a Chinese artist living in New York since 1995, with a second house in Beijing, which he needed as the director of Visual and Special Effects for the 2008 Olympics. With the adoption of capitalism, China has become a powerhouse in art, not only saturating the art world with artists but becoming a major art center and market for art itself. Cai is among the most visible artists working today, and he brings to the new global art a Chinese background and perspective. Like ÿonzalez-Torres, Cai is primarily a Conceptual artist working in a broad range of mediums. His oeuvre, however, is dominated by installation art and the use of explosions, namely fireworks, which he used so effectively in the opening ceremonies at the 2008 Olympics and which have become his signature style. By using gunpowder, a Chinese invention, Cai is able to underscore his cultural identity, which he does as well by working with Chinese calligraphy, dragons, Chinese medicine, and feng shui, an ancient art and science that reveals how to balance the energy of any given space to assure health and good fortune. He started working with explosives while living in Japan between 1986 and 1995, reveling in the spontaneity and chance of the medium and finding it an emotional release from the stifling artistic and social environment of precapitalist 1980s China. As the artist explains: Explosions make you feel something intense at the very core of your being because, while you can arrange explosives as you please, you cannot control the explosion itself. And this fills you with a great deal of freedom. Cai draws with explosives, on a small scale by drawing with gunpowder on large sheets of paper that he then ignites, and on a large scale with fireworks, which sometimes resemble Chinese calligraphy. In 2003, Cai was commissioned by New York City and the Central Park Conservancy to create an explosion piece in Central Park. Titled Light Cycle: Explosion Project for Central Park (fig. 30.30), the work lasted four minutes and was divided into three parts Signal towers (pillars of light), The Light Cycle (a series of haloes), and White Night (small-shell explosions of brilliant white light). The degree to which Cai controls the explosions is remarkable. He draws and paints with the medium. Through his work, Cai seeks to capture a spiritual essence. He has said that his work is for extraterrestrials, and he has subtitled many of his explosions Project for Extraterrestrials. Just as the art world has become global, so Cai, perhaps with a little wink, is looking beyond earth, seeking to create art for the universe. 0.30 Cai uo-iang, Light Cycle: Explosion Project for Central Park. Tiger tails, titanium solutes fitted with computer chips, shells with descending stars, 4 minutes. Realized at Central Park, New York, 45 p.m. September 15, 2003. 3 1106 PA RT I V T H E M O D ER N W O R L D The Postmodern Era: Art Since 1980 * 1980 82 Michael Graves s Public Services Building, Portland, Oregon 1980 * 1979 89 Soviet-Afghan War 1979 90 Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1979 Jerry Falwell forms Moral Majority 1981 89 Ronald Reagan is President of the USA 1981 Sandra Day O Connor is the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court 1981 First AIDS cases reported 1981 A New Spirit in Painting, a painting exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 1982 Maya Lin s Vietnam Veterans Memorial * 1985 * * 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster 1986 Ivan Boesky, an arbitrageur specializing in corporate takeovers and mergers, is on the cover of Time December 1 1987 The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union 1988 Magiciens de la Terre, an exhibition dedicated to global art, presented at the Pompidou Center, 1983 Anselm Kiefer s To the Unknown Painter 1983 Elizabeth Murray s More Than You Know 1982 Equal Rights Amendment defeated 1983 Barbara Kruger s We Won t Play Nature to Your Culture 1990 * 1989 Berlin Wall torn down 1989 Student protests in Tiananmen Square, Beijing * 1990 Germany Reunited 1990 91 Persian Gulf War * 1991 U.S.S.R. is dissolved 1991 92 Republic of South Africa repeals apartheid 1992 Saatchi Gallery, London mounts exhibition Young British Artists 1991 Felix GonzalezTorres s Untitled (billboard of an empty bed) * 1994 Nelson Mandela elected president of South Africa 1994 World Wide Web launched 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement * 2001 Al Qaeda terrorists attack the United States * 2003 United States invades Iraq 1995 2000 1992 97 Frank Gehry s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain 1992 Fred Wilson s Mining the Museum * 2008 Beijing hosts Olympics; Cai Guo-Qiang artistic director of opening and closing ceremonies 2008 Barack Obama is elected the first AfricanAmerican President of the United States 2010 2003 Cai Guo-Qiang s Light Cycle: Explosion Project for Central Park 1107

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The Baltimore Museum of Art. The Cone

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