Dove: 1910’s

Abstraction #21

• He started off with a bang: In 1910 Dove contributed 10 abstract paintings to Stieglitz show at #291

• Is this full abstract II? If so, then Dove is the first Abstract II artist ever. EVER! There are complications: he was interested in children’s art “the primordial” etc. (Stieglitz had his show of Children’s art in 1912). Dove commonly liked a sense of suggested form in suggested space, more or less overtly. That does not rule out Abstract II, so back to the question: is this?

• The difference between abstract 1 and 2 was not defined at this point

• We are pretty sure the answer is that this is absolutely abstract and that he wasn’t thinking of anything for subject matter while he was making this

• Makes the viewers able to interpret the painting and see different subject matters

• Not able to tell what way is right side up with this abstract paintings

Dove: 1910’s

Plant Forms

• What he has seen at the Armory show he has already seen and nothing is really new

• This has a limited color palette- it's a key art technique at this time

• Have many organic curved shapes

• Has tonal gradations to suggest that these forms are round

• Very painterly and doesn’t have any crisp sharp edges

• Have influenced fromt the microscopic photographers - trying to get inspiration from them but separate from them by painting. It is simply forms and he doesn’t need any subject matter. He probably wasn’t even looking at a plant while painting this

Dove: 1920’s

Waterfall

• Limited color palette- not trying to be loud

• Has a lot of texture in the painting, made from oils

• Much more crisped edge then “Plant Forms”, has many stroke marks making shapes and forms

• He isn’t leading at painting abstraction style, but his is reflecting what the cutting edge painters are doing and what is exceptable

Dove: 1930’s

Sand Barge

• He is looking at precisionism and industrial style. But making it much more abstract

• Very abstraction #2 other than the industrial looking style

Dove: 1930’s

Naples Yellow Morning

• This is basically where he ties his career off

• Painting slightly looks like a landscape, has a Whistler type title

• At this point he starts to experiment with other paints than oil

• Has enough subject matter that it's not really moving

• HE DOESN’T HAVE A STYLE OR A PHILOSOPHY- HE IS JUST CHASING MODERN ART

Dove: 1940’s

Pozzuoli Red

• Named after the beautiful red pigment used in this painting

• Other artist like Jackson Pollock had just started painting by this time

• Very, very abstract items- manipulating you to interact to try to find any type of subject matter

• He is not generating any cutting edge ideas- he is just reflecting them

MacDonald-Wright: 1910-20

Abstraction on the Spectrum: Organization #5

• Abstraction was a pure art term, not music at all. Was a new concept/ term at this time

• Has a very modern title. Much like a Whistler but not using a musical term. He is trying to NOT name a subject matter in the title

• Has different shapes and colors that the viewers eyes respond to based on their forms- put there for your eyes to catch them

• Has many soft shapes- doesn’t have any crisp hard lines

• Like a Whistler - it's not subject matter it's a the painting and using painterly techniques to make sure people know it's a painting

• Very happy painting with many rectilinear and curvilinear lines/shapes

• The colors are interesting and bright- very upbeat and using a variety of colors

• Trying to put on a show for the viewer

• He has shapes and forms that he was able to bring to the front to help the viewer's eyes move around the painting, makes it more complicated and elaborate

MacDonald-Wright: 1920’s

Aeroplane: Synchromy in Yellow-Orange

• By 1920 it's not as radical as it was when Stieglitz did this in 1910, people can have the chance to actually ride on a plane, but still have a very modern feel

• This painting has actually subject matter- not realism, just shapes

• Has many rectilinear and curvilinear shapes

• Has lots of colors that have been harmonized

• Trying to exploit many different things that people would have been interested in 1920

• Warm and decorative and can succeed in America

Russel:1910’s

Cosmic Synchromy

• Russell and MacDonald are working the same style but they have different philosophies

• Clearer and more designed than MacDonald

• Has areas that are curvilinear bright colors that move to the front and has colors that fade into the background

• Has more rich and complicated colors / structors than MacDonald

• Has a wider use of tones and darker colors than MacDonald - wanted it to be more designed and have clarity

• Not a limited color palette, but has stark colors and have a more consistent use of tonality

Russell: 1910’s

Synchromy in Orange: To Form

• Has lots and lots of solid chunks of dark

• Stark and hard edges, uses lots of whites and blacks used throughout

• Design is more important to him than color, he is focusing all on shapes and forms

• Very carefully designed and created

Hartley: 1910’s

Portrait of a German Officer

• Very identical to his other painting

• He was very interested by a boy in uniform- but he was killed in 1914

• This might by a type of monument for him

• The modern art world almost shut down during WWI in Europe because of the war- Modernism was still much alive in New York

• He is making a substantial contribution to modern art is America, even though he wasn’t cutting edge

• Hartley is really following any good lead of artistic styles that he can follow

• His style changes a lot, especially when Georgia O’Keeffe comes along

Stella: 1910’s

Battle of Lights: Coney Island

• Coney Island is a place where there is sparkling entertainment

• Very similar to Gino Severini’s painting Dynamic Hieroglyph of Bal Tabarin- this is the American version of this- the essence of Coney Island all crammed into this painting

• You can almost hear the music and the people

• You can’t recognize any specific things- but some small things

• Even though this is extremely busy for a painting it is still Cubism and couldn’t be mistaken for any other Cubist painter out there

• For 1913 Coney Island is technologically advanced and it's very fascinating to many people

• He was looking for excitement of the modern era

• It's sort of cubism and futurism

• Steiglitz recognized this that the Armory show and made a relationship with Stella

Stella: 1910’s

Brooklyn Bridge

• Everyone in New York recognizes this and are proud of this bridge because it took a lot of work

• Its was the highest and longest at the time and used advanced technology to create

• New Yorkers were proud of it and it help and made living in New York much easier at the time

• Americans and New Yorkers were watching closely as this bridge was being made, many workers died in the process of making this bridge

• Many workers would die from the Bends when they would come up too quickly after scuba diving

• Its was fascinating for people to walk across once the bridge was finished

• He is choosing a night time setting that includes many, many different views

Weber: 1900-10

Summer

• He doesn't mind copying other people, such as Cezanne

• It isn’t crisp, but it is clear and has black outlines

• It has a very gritty and painterly texture

• Subject matter has a kind of garden of Eden feel

• Colors are meant to be brash, but it isn’t really

• Has mask like stylization in the faces and body, but mostly in the faces

• This is his early on style that he eventually moves away from

• Really doesn't matter the title of the painting, it's a modernist design, doesn’t really give a feeling of summer

• Clearly getting inspiration from Cezanne and Matisse

Weber: 1910’s

Music

• This is when you see European influence artist like Weber, Steiglitz and Dove

• This is very modern for 1912

• Whenever music is mentioned in painting it is channeling Whistlers philosophy

Weber: 1910’s

Avoirdupois

• Avoirdupois - means literally having weight, very masculine/ big term

• Very much a painting of American thinking

• Looking at Cubism and Futurism

• Very mechanical- almost like you can hear clicking and ticking

Weber: 1910’s

New York

• The fact that this is New York makes it modern - the city that never sleeps

• George Bellows already did something like this. - Showing the hustle and bustle of New York

• New York really did feel a lot different than other cities like Paris and London because it they didn’t have skyscrapers - it was much different than other cities

Weber: 1910’s

Chinese Restaurant

• He is attempting to channel synthetic cubism again

• This looks a little like a collage, but this is all painted

• Looks like he just painted everything that was on the table

• This was a bit of a finaminam at the turn of the century- kind of a way of feeling the neighborhood in areas like Chinatown / area of cliff dwellers

• Place to get very cheap food from a different ethnicity

• Kind of like a flashback from his experience at this place- kind of an encapsulation

• Not a specific experience or specific place- multiple experiences and multiples places

Weber: 1910’s

Rush Hour, NY

• Depicting New York when it is at its busiest time

• Kind of cubism and futurism

• Shows some subject matter that looks like structors and a little like art deco

• Trying to capture a lot of motion

• Complexly composted to make a harmony

• Kind of shows the fast paced lifestyle of New York

Weber: 1910’s

Construction

• The title tells you that it isn’t trying to be anything, it's just trying to be a Weber

Weber: 1910’s

Athletic Contest

• Using a very limited color palette

• Using many curvilinear shapes and abstracted massively

• Shows the hustle and bustle of the active

• Shows a human subject matter- which is strange for cubist and futurist

• Composted with many very dark lines

• Has a much stronger visual presence than what Picasso was up to at the time

Weber: 1910’s

The Two Musicians

• Jazz was a cool thing that could only really be found in New York- very serious cool jazz

• There isn’t really any other artistic photographers interested in jazz even though it was a very different and very interesting subject matter

• Gives you a sence that there is something that is very remarkable about this music/ art world

Weber: 1910’s

Spiral Rhythm

• Has amazing curves that just screams out to be touched

• Truly abstract 3D sculpture- allows the viewers to interpret it as they like

• Looks completely different from every angle

• Looks very smooth and almost greasy

• Edges look very sharps, but the curves sides look organic and smooth

• Could almost become a human figure with a little imagination

Alexander Archipenko: 1910’s

Woman Combing her hair

• He is fairly easy to like as an artist

• He is good at making different texture in bronze

• Its not sexual at all- just a statement in modern art

• It was very popular because he could make many small bronze figurine

Schamberg: 1910’s

Painting VIII: Mechanical Abstraction

• Makes people question how it works

• It irritates people because they don’t know what it's supposed to be and it doesn’t make any sense

• Its trying to be whimsical and is just something that people don’t get- its almost the point to irritate people

Schamberg: 1910’s

God

• Titled God - and it really is just a sculpture of plumping

• The original idea of plumping was very modern and amazing because it gave people access to running water

• It's common day objects with a title what gets many people upset- also meant to be whimsical

Ben Shahn: 1940’s

Miners Wife

• It's not a specific story

• It's not a specific person- it's all about the story of the Miners

• It's just Shahn commenting about the hard life of these people- Nothing like Gorky’s personal portrait of his mother

• He's is just painting something that is happening - commentary painter- doesn’t have any personal connection to this painting's subject matter

Raphael Soyer: 1940’s

Portrait of Arshile Gorky

• Soyer was a very good painter but he was never really cutting edge.- Very good but not very important

• He was like Stieglitz in the way that he supported young painters

Gorky: 1940’s

Carnival

• These paintings are usually something that he throughout a lot and did studies on before he created the painting

• The bright colors make this painting more colorful than his usual paintings - Name “Carnival” can make you see why the painting would be so colorful

• He wants the viewers to have a sense that there is figures there

• This is way over the top with textures because there is so many different textures

• He created the painting to look like it has foreground and middle ground

Gorky: 1940’s

Garden in Sochi

• Trying to make an abstract painting that has a personal connection to his father's garden

• This is from when his family was together and had a garden before they were taken into the mountains and starved to death

• Has a very different feeling than some of his paintings like Carnival

• Its trying to hind that the pleasure he gets from the garden and its memory

• This is very abstract, the painting could be flipped upsidedown and it wouldn’t really make much of a difference

Gorky: 1940’s

How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in my Life

• Trying to make it the feeling, not the memory

• Its one little thing that he remembers solidly in his mind- something that is always there no matter how much older he gets

• This is more abstract that this point then what Jackson Pollack was at this time

• He has very thin washes that dribble down the painting- he did this all on purpose - it's all part of the process and his experience

Gorky: 1940’s

The Liver is the Cock’s Comb

• This isn’t one of his personal ones with a memory from his youth

• Title is referring to a roster and the red around its face- title suggest that something is going on here

• This has brash loud and conflicting colors

• Has more of a composition then his other painting of the garden or his mother's apron  

• Very painterly, the lines are the only crisp things on the painting- gives it more of a roughness that gives it less of a happy feeling with the mood

• It looks like he has put items there for the view to pick out, but they are not able to figure out what it is because its so abstract and can be seen as many different things

• There is no way to understand this, the viewer can only give up no matter how much they want to figures this painting out

Gorky: 1940’s

Agony

• This is one of the painting that he created after his car accident and before he killed himself in 1948. He thought his life couldn’t be any worse then it was in 1915 but then near the end of his life he has wave after wave of despair. Cancer, impotent, car accident damaging his hand, studio fire before a bit solo show, failed marriage, and finally killing himself

• This painting is intense and dark and is meant to be so.

• The shape never resolves itself into something that is neither pleasant or unpleasant

• Painting is very unresolved and dark compared to some of this other paintings. Looks like it needs to be something or look like something but it won't

• There is color contrast and a lot of conflict - literally the color of blood and fire

• This is almost a self portrait of a mind that is full of despair and imploding

Weber: 1940’s

The Wayfarers

• From a subject matter point of view this is conservative compared to Gorky- same kind of thing Gorky is going but much less personal

• Somes people in Europe trying to escape but not really showing where they are going

• Essentially ending with caricatures

• Two large figures in the front makes the painting look much larger

Weber: 1940’s

Three Literary Gentlemen

• The three face like shapes make it look almost like it's a cubist style

• The 2D and very controlled lines are very Gorky like. They are clear but don’t really define subject matter- Weber is channeling something that Gorky does very well.

Davis: 1920’s

Lucky Strike

• It looks a lot like a collage- he is at least thinking about synthetic cubism

• Its bigger than anything in real life and is a painting even though it looks like it's a collage

• During WWII Lucky Strikes color was green, it was normal to see this sitting as trash on the sidewalk in NYC

• This is very much pop art look that this painting has, very modern how the letters were brought into the painting- becomes part of his artistic decision

• He doesn’t stick to a style like this for very long

• Since he is painting in a very large scale it has a very different meaning than a cubist painting- Hes making a Stuart Davis

• Most people will be thinking it's a cigarette packet and they won't see past the subject matter

Davis: 1920’s

Eggbeater #4

• Hand egg beaters at the time were really modern

• Taking a very Georgia O'Keefe style with painting the subject matter over and over but while looking at the last painting and not the item anymore

• It's all part of the process to call it egg beater- the process of making a Stuart Davis

• Either the viewer is going to be amused or frustrated that they can’t find an egg beater- the egg beater is the challenge that makes it hard for people to understand

• Never going to be anything about challenging- statement about modern life and how the egg beater was very modern at the like

Davis: 1930’s

House and Street

• Kind of style you see in egg beaters 1-4.

• Its is 1 painting even though it looks like 2

• Its is anti-warm and anti-human - it really does feel like depression. You can tell that he would like it to be a little more brighter and whimsical- he is responding to what was happening in America at the time.

Davis: 1930’s

Terminal

• Very, very colorful- probably means that things are looking up for him compared to what it was in “House and Street”

• Showing humans and human activity where there is work and people recovering from the great depression

• Has lines- lots of lines that give a sense of busyness all over the painting

Davis: 1930’s

Abstraction

• It is abstraction Type 1 and it has a lot a elements that are part of the Start Davis type of painting

• Some things are recognizable and some of the stapes are just pleasing

• Colors are very bright and warm. There is more complex combinations and has a lot of “crayola” out of the box colors

• He's showing how he feels to live in New York at the time  - very happy  

Davis: 1930’s

Mural for Radio Station WNYC

• Looks very collage like again and has many crisp straight lines

• Some things are recognizable - Has a music note and a saxophone, clarinet - the radio station plays Jazz

• There was no such thing as small radio equipment at the time.

• Showing a slice of life of modern technology at the time- The point was the modern items

• This painting was a commissioned painting for the radio station

Davis: 1940’s

Report from Rockport

• His titles become amusing little plays on words and is whimsical. It's usually just a interesting play on words

• Has a lot and lot of textures throughout - it is possibly descriptive and is possibly not - texture just says that his is making a Stuart Davis

• The setting it's the closest thing that he comes to a subject matter. - It does have a few subject matter type things but nothing that is fully flushed out.

• No human activity being recognized here- but doesn’t need it to set the mood- isn’t like his painting “House and Street” at all with the missing human activity.

• The mood is the key thing with any Stuart Davis painting - this one has a weirdness of a setting that is just bizarre and difficult to piece together

• Has some saturated primary colors- most of these colors have a splash to them and are not really coordinated

Davis: 1940’s

Hot Still-Scape for 6 Colors - 7th Avenue Style

• The title is intended to be whimsical and not conventional - Isn't a landscape or a still life

• He is intending for this to be a whimsical painting and not something for people to think and work through

• Has a notion that this is “Hot off the presses” or something along those lines

• Has big distinct areas of patterns

• Trying to get people energized about modernism

• Gives a sence like there is almost a 3 dimensional space like a room with walls in this painting

O'Keeffe: 1915-20

Painting #21: Palo Duro Canyon

• Has round items around the bottom as if they are supposed to be boulders

• She did skechers and thumbnails before she did this painting

• She does landscapes throughout her career, it's a subject that comes and goes

• She is exploiting the shapes and creating this valley

• She's experimenting with different degrees of complications

• She's making a painting!- Not subject matter - Title demonstrates this and then shows that the inspiration came from a canyon

• Like a more expream Whistler- The reds and oranges are all part of O'Keeffe's state of mind  

• The loudness, brashness and texture are all things that are going to go away for O’Keeffe- this is only what early work looks like for her

O’Keeffe: 1915-20

Evening Star III

• This is a numbered sequence where she is experimenting with different degrees of abstraction

• If this is based on a personal experiment it's very internalized.

• She started to experiment in color with this sequence of paintings

• She is very much experimenting and not really creating a landscape

• She is working in watercolor, and sometimes the watercolors get away from her and bleed, not sure if she intended for this to happen

• This is art that she considers extremely experimental- there is an experiential development going in this sequence

O’Keeffe: 1915-20

Lighting Coming on the plains II

• It's a very interesting point of view

• Showing either a sunset or sunrise

• The title lets the viewer know that there is actually subject matter

• She uses a circular shape that very carefully crafted and doesn’t really look like what its out to be on the plains

• These would still be successful upside down, but it would lose its subject matter  

O’Keeffe: 1915-20

From the Plains I

• They have a subject matter kind of feel- like it came from landscape

• This are cool and she finds them cool

• She has switched from watercolor to oils

• She really loves to use these crisp sharp shapes.

• Looks like she might be trying to exploit something in the landscape

• She's enjoying this real freedom she has in modernism

O’Keeffe: 1915-20

Orange and Red Streak

• They have a subject matter kind of feel- like it came from landscape

• This are cool and she finds them cool

• She has switched from watercolor to oils

• She really loves to use these crisp sharp shapes.

• Looks like she might be trying to exploit something in the landscape

• She's enjoying this real freedom she has in modernism

O’Keeffe: 1920’s

The Shelton with Sunspots

• This is very much a Steglitz subject matter, but she doesn’t stick to it for very long

• She's making sure to have the light source high up in the sky

• She turns the architecture into designs with accent pieces

• The bright light source makes part of the architecture disappear

• The confetti at the bottom is nothing that can be created with a camera lense- She's just trying to make the painting a more richer experience

• She isn’t using colors from the architecture- she is picking the colors - the architecture is color coordinated and the sunspots are separately color coordinated

• They become a new york experience and an O'Keeffe experience

O’Keeffe: 1930’s

Manhattan

• Is almost like a Max Weber- isn’t any specific buildings

• Has many things that are overlapping and zig zag

• She's just throwing the flowers in because they please her - she creates two harmonies and a contrast

• It's a fun painting but everything architecture wise is all wrong

O’Keeffe: 1920’s

Blue and Green Music

• Not sure if this is part of a process- seems to be a one off

• Has a nice limited color pallet that is very harmonized- has a very soft and delicate look overall

• Has very nice curved lines and straight lines

• Its to a large degree pastel and very soft with stark and strong saturated colors

• Hard to say what subject matter it comes from of it it's just one subject matter - could be clouds, water, or landform

• The whole painting is just a really dramatic question- hard to make sense of the subject matter

• It looks like it does have items moving from the foreground to the background

O’Keeffe: 1920’s

Pink Tulips

• Have very delicate and curvilinear shapes that look very organic and harmonize together  

• Has a limited color palette but his complicated - Has greens that sort of are not leaves- they are just color grounds to make the pick tones more emphatic

• Using a technique similar to microscopic photography- really taking something small and making it larger than life

• She doesn’t really use a lot of dark in this painting at all

• She is inspired by many different subject matters so there isn’t alway consistency.- switches arounds between flowers, architecture, and abstraction

• It's easy to make a painting in her style, hard to know when it's done

O’Keeffe: 1920’s

Black Iris

• Has a very limited color pallet with high contrast

• Looks like there might have been something flower based for the subject matter

O’Keeffe: 1930’s

Jack-in-the-Pulpit IV

• Number IV is the most popular out of this set- it has a very powerful composition

• Looks a lot like a vagina but is also very flower like- not supposed to be a literal illustration of that

• Blueish green tones looks like it's almost a landform

• It's not trying to illustrate the flower- it's trying to be an O’Keeffe

O’Keeffe: 1930’s

Cup of Silver

• This is very much an illustration of a flower - quite literal - doesn’t need to be illustrated, shes just doing whatever works and whatever she likes

• Has a limited color pallet in greens and yellows - has 2 major tonalities- has a contrast of cool and warm

• Has crisp edges and tonal gradations

O’Keeffe: 1920’s

White Birch

• Looks like if she was going to do a series of this but ended up not because she got what she wanted out of this painting

• Has big shapes- some are not even really tree shaped

• The trunks are there to be the big white shapes- she doesn’t do the texture of the tree

• Very limited color pallet and tones

• It's not about the trees- it's about the elegant forms and shapes

O’Keeffe: 1940’s

Cliffs Beyond Abiquiu: Dry Waterfall

• Has very interesting liner shapes that lead the viewer's eyes around the painting- many art history gestures

• Has interesting warm tones of picks and yellows

• She put a lot of effort into this and so much O’Keeffe into this painting

• Has little accent pieces of little white things (probably boulders) and little shrubs

• Has some subtle horizontal and vertical layer

O’Keeffe: 1930’s

Ranchos Church

• This is a human composition but it looks like it organically belongs there in this environment

• She isn’t trying to copy the shape, but learn from them and make them into O’Keeffe shapes

O’Keeffe: 1940’s

In the Patio I

• This is a beloved subject matter for her- it's her patio in her house in New Mexico

• She comes back to this subject matter of Adobe architecture over and over

• Limited color pallet- rectilinear shapes - throughout composition all part of the 2 dimensional design

O’Keeffe: 1940’s

Stump in Red Hills

• This is a still life subject - also landscape

• This is a subject matter that was assembled in the painting- nothing like she has ever really seen

• Complicated presentation of form but not of color- color are very simple tones of reds and yellows

• Has and organic look that isn’t just tree- almost like a human figure is in there- looks more live then just a dead tree stump

• It’s not about wood or the landscape- it's about being an O’Keeffe  

O’Keeffe: 1930’s

Cow’s Skull w/ Calico Roses

• Her still lives look fantastic whether or not she has the object in front of her

• From her point of view these items put together are satisfying

• Become a perfect limited color pallet

• Uses slightly natural earth/ brown tones

O’Keeffe: 1930’s

Red & Pink Rocks and Teeth

• These are treated like a microscopic photographer would treat them

• Rather simple painting - but gives a rather bizarre experience

O'Keeffe: 1940's

Pelvis III

O'Keeffe: 1940's

Pelvis Series: Red and Yellow

O'Keeffe: 1960's

It was Blue & Green

O'Keeffe: 1960's 

Green Yellow and Orange