Translation of Power Point for Final

Modern Art Comes to America

The Armory Show of 1913

• Over 2,000 pieces of modern European art hung for a month in 1913

• Exhibited all major moderns including Matisse and Picasso

• Notably missing form the show were the German Expressionists except for one Kirchner landscape and on Kandinsky

• Of course the critics, reporters, editorialists had a field day lampooning the work as degenerate culture

• “American Art Progress” magazine compared the Europeans to anarchists, lunatics, depraved

• The public flocked to see these innovative wonders from Europe

• Over 300,000 visitors

• The reaction by the artists was mixed, as some embraced it, while others resented it

Alfred Stieglitz

• Photographer and gallery owner, pioneer in championing photography as a medium for fine art

• The gallery endeavor at 291 5th Ave, NYC became the headquarters for the international modern ar tin the United States

291

• Alfred Stieglitz important photographer who worked to break down the artificial barrier between photography and art

• Influential in showing works never seen before in the Unites States , showing works by Cezanne, Toulouse Lautrec. Rodin, Picasso Braque, Matisse and Constantin Brancusi

• His works and the Armory show of 1913 demonstrated how old the American realistic approach to painting truly was

Georgia O’Keefe

• Promising, original young artist to show at 291

• Later became Stieglitz’s wife

• Promising use of color and form to create new paintings

• Famous for her large scale flower drawings, which were always refered to as female genitalia

Ansel Adams

• A photographer like Stieglitz

• Presented photographic views of the grand American West

• Had an exhibition with Stieglitz in the fall of 1936, which made his career as a B & W photographer

American Scene Painting

• The American artists who rejected the European modernists developed this American style

• O’Keefe gave us the great American painting “Red, White and Blue” with a cows head skull and red and blue stripes

• Preeminent art scene in America in the 1920’s

Edward Hopper

• A poet if human isolation

• “Nighthawks showing the loneliness of the café and happen chance meeting

Grant Wood

• In the early 1930’s “regionalism” emerged strident distaste for the European modernists

• Asserted itself in the Midwest

• American Gothic has become a true and cherished national emblem

• Depicts a farmer and his daughter

Dorothea Lange

• Socially conceived photojournalism and documentary photography

• Help through government agencies like the WPA and the FSA (Farm Security Administration)

• Sent photographers into the drought parched rural America

• Produced stunning views of America in distress

• Became known as the Madonna of the Depression

Diego Rivera

• The Mexican Revolution spurned a spirit of nationalistic mural painting

• Depicted propaganda, inspirational public art reflecting the history and social spirit

• Worked with the two other remarkable social minded muralists, Jose Clement Orozco and David Siqueiros

• Resurgent Feminism may have catapulted Frida Kahlo from relative obscurity to what may be the greatest Mexican artist of the 20th century

The New York School

• The foremost artistic phenomenon of its time Abstract Expressionism, the firs truly American art movement

• Mid 40’s to the end of the 60’s transferred the center of the art world from Paris and greater Europe to New York

• Paintings with an abstract rich in Emotive content

• Highly monumental scale

• Truly heroic grandeur

• Federal Art project organized by the WPA (Works Project Administration began during the crippling poverty of the Great Depression

• Enabled artists like Jackson Pollock and William DeKooning to create freely, without financial restraints

The First Generation

• Willem de Kooning, Dutch

• Mark Rothko, Russian

• Jackson Pollock, Wyoming

• Robert Motherwell, San Francisco

• Lee Krasner, New York

• Emulated the café studio life of Paris in seedy cafeterias and dingy downtown lofts

• Gave precedence to process over conception

Abstract Expressionism

• The great influence of collector and importer Peggy Guggenheim and her gallery “Art of the Century” showed these new Americans along with the great European masters

• Broken into two distinct branches

– Action Painting: Extroverted, spontaneous, gestural, painterly

– Color Field Painting: quiet, cerebral, flat atmospheric color

Willem de Kooning

• A true giant of the Abstract Expressionists

• Firmly held to his commitment to the human presence in his work

• Most famous series titled Women

• Important influence of Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror” acquired by the MoMA in 1938

Jackson Pollock

• Career propelled by collector Peggy Guggenheim and critic Harold Rosenberg

• Drip Paintings were the most original series of paintings to emerge in the post war period

• Lasted only from 1947 to 1950, Pollock could not sustain the vigorous energy to continue

• Led to his self-destruction

Mark Rothko

• Most renowned of the color field painters

• Bright hue in unbroken color fields contrasted sharply with the energies of the “action painters”

• Stacks of glowing atmospheric rectangles

• Pure color abstraction, stained the shapes directly onto the unprimed duct (canvas)

• Carried out with sponges and rags rather than brushes

Robert Motherwell

• Stated all my works consist of a dialect between conscious (straight lines, shapes, weighted colors) and the unconscious (soft lines, obscured shapes)

• Resolved in a synthesis which differs as a whole from either