Stieglitz - The Steerage - 1907

1.Decicions made to create goals?

• Straight, Crisp, harsh angles, cutting off people, class division, irregular framing. To make it powerful did all these things.
2.How does the work respond to history and peers?

• Is a response to the dominant artistic photogrpahy: Pictorialism - wanted to move away from the soft focus of Steichen.

• Saw Strands abstraction at a time when photography was being left behind by Modernism and Strand's work combined the two through an ambiguity of controlled light that went beyond a normal type of seeing: "hyper-vision."

• Picabia did a portrait of Stieglitz as a machine, as only a camera, this connects to use of machine in art and human subjects as machines. 
3.How does the work respond to larger social realities?
• American photo. connected to Russian Constructivist avante guard's goal to get rid of Bourgeois artist and go toward engineering.  Materials are basis for the work and the work should be scientific and build for society therefore photography demanded a reponse to social crisis and to be socially useful. 

Strand - Abstraction, Porch Shadows, Twin Lakes, Connecticut - 1916

• Brought Modernisn and photog. together through the abstractions he did through the straight photog. process.  Beep ambiguity through controlled use of light.  Was not important that you cannot recognize the objects in the photo as normal "abstraction" implies, but was more influential as a type of "hyper-vision" : beyond normal type of seeing.
• Looks like cubism'
• fuck off

Lange - Migrant Mother - 1936

• WPA : Works Progress Administration, worked for government.  Taken during the Great Depression.  This image shows empathy and sympathy in order for normal viewers to identify with these people.  Wanted socially usefull photos like the Russian Avant-guard. 
• "Humanitarian Realism" that Stryker supported.
• came to stand for emotional appeal, effectiveness, and memory searing quality of the FSA's work. (Farm Security Admin.)

Evans - Houses, Atlanta, Georgia - 1936

• FDR's New Deal program created ecomonic programs to provide reform, relief, and Recovery during the Great Depression.
• Work is detached and at arms length, straight on composition.
• Direct and unmodified style makes idea of artist vs. machine even greater because it further questions the hand of the artist.  Is this art or documentary? Man.... OR MACHINE.

Burnham & Root - Reliance Building, Chicago - 1894

• Ideal of social transformation through architecture and design was the driving force of modern culture.  Utopian idea that good architecture would improve the lives of the people and vice versa.  This was not realized, too ideal.
• In 1871 Chicago fires created new opportunities through a lack of traditions, an intoxicating rawness, where big thrived.  Louis Sullivan created load bearing steel frame which lead to the mostly glass-covered exterior of the building.
• The glass-covered exterior defied gravity and created a light and airy facade. "chicago-windows" reduced the walls to a stack of transparencies. 
• This forshadowed the "less is more" modern style that would be to come.

Mies van der Rohe - Seagram Building, New York - 1958

• Formal absoluted approached by the rectilinear use of materials.  Glass was the essence of the skyscraper, the skyscraper the essence of the modern city.  No more load bearing walls. 
• "less is more" idea began with Adolf Loos's discovery that the "evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament"
• "Expressionist tower of purity" : a polished crystal. 
• Curtain wall made of bronze in order to exemplify color and shadow play inside a surrounding darkness

Le Corbusier - Villa Savoye, Poissy - 1931

• At this time, ornament and decoration disappear from modern building and there is a need to express structure and function. Corbusier is impressed with machine as a model.
• Suspended buiding on steel poles for a sense of lightness.  Core of bulding is a ramp.  Radical building, and can be seen as classical with columns on outside like the Parthenon.  Corbousier influenced by history.  Hybrid between machine and classical. 
• Strove to emphasize the "white world" : clarity and preceision, exact proportion and precise materials.  Delicate play between transparent and opaque : stucco walls emphasized by long strips of sliding windows.
• Most well known example of International Style: sense of etiquette and truth-telling: no decoration or appearance of load carrying.

Rietveld - Red and Blue Chair - 1918

• A form of supranational discorse and universal language.  Wanted to cross boundaries and end capatilist individualism to lead into a new spiritualized order.  This is the purpose of the harsh rectangles and primary colors, which were drawn from the paintings of Mondrian.  Wanted to bring austerity and understanding through a "grammar of shape."  DESTIJL.
• Influenced the Bauhaus but would not compromise with comfort or decor because they believed in a restriced form of shape and color that would apply to every art.

Picasso - Olga Picasso in an Armchair - 1917

• After the chaos of WWI artists sought comfort/assurance of a traditional style and therefore art became more conservative and classical.  France identifies themselves as heirs to Italian classical style (they border italy).
• After experimentation go back to order in search of an ideological focal point that began with the classical.
• WHY: 1) general desire to return to classical as a trend OR 2) Picasso's desire to console himself with the traditional due to life difficulties
• EXPLANATION: 1) Artist responding to society.  I.e. comfort/assurance after WWI. OR 2) Within art itself, i.e. artwork responds to earlier artowrk and rejects or accepts it.  EX: Picasso using paint as a collage medium (like synth. cubism) to cut and paste and once again open up the canvas to new possibilities.

Grosz - The Poet, Max Herman Neisse - 1927

• Germany never felt itself to be part of the mediterranean/roman classical tradition/ideology as France does.  They are going through a period of massive turmoil and social tension due to the loss of the emperor and the war. 
• New Objectivity is the effort in Germany to toward conservative art.  Focus on achieving a revolting truth by rejecting expressionistic inwardness and dada's focus on the people through photocollage and instead represented the real world in an unflattering and unpleasnt way.
• The intensified ambiguity of the photographic and caricature style of the painting is appropriate to the subject matter, the poet, whose writings shift to chamioning conservative expressionists. 

Miro - Constellation: Awakening in the Early Morning - 1941

• Surrealism was turning inward into artist's mind and away from organized political activity.  Use idea of unconscious that comes from Freud to set up this turn into the mind.  Use images outisde the tradition of art such as children, mentally ill, "primitive" art.  Fascination with the uncanny and bizzare.  Techniques included ornamentation, cumpulsiveness, copying/duplicating, obsessive, unbalanced system building.
• Miro's painting comes from the more automatic side of surrealism, the side that deals with a free lyrical absurdity of the subconscious in order to bring about the effective, risk-free possession of oneself.  For example, in The Farm, Miro tries to recollect objects and images from childhood but without forcing the though.  His throught process is almost like the process of automatic writing.
• He is influenced by the brisk patterns of cubism and the Fauve colors of Matisse. 

Ernst - Two Children Are Menaced By a Nightingale - 1924

• Ernst's technique of showing the unconscious uses collage to achieve the uncanny effect.  There is a tension between the real and the bizarre that is created by certain juxtapositions of certain images.  Mystery, melancholy, and anxiety are called upon in this piece because it raises the strange question of why two children would be threatened by a small bird.  There is a disproportion between the bird's song and the terror it inspires.  This amplifies the theme of the marvelous through a chance association that creates a sense of wonder.
• The use of 3D object in a collage/photomontage manner relates to techniques of mentally ill artists that use ornamentation and the play between positive and negative space to create the uncanny.  The paper collage also calls to mind Picasso's synthetic cubism and rejection of painting. 

De Chirico - Melancholy and Mystery of a Street - 1914

• Italian artist from whom the surrealists took mood, melancholy, emptiness and the small figure out of his paintings.  He was more of a predecessor to surrealism. 
• This painting emphasizes strange encounters and juxtapositions between objects.  The shadow of the figure in the top right corner creates an ominous mood that forces the small girl figure to draw into herself.

Oppenheim - Luncheon in Fur - 1936

• Is a self-contradictory image os astounding power that links two images that are not rationally linked: fur and a tea cup.  This juxtaposition calls to mind Dali's paranoia critical method through the ambiguity of the object and it's interpretation.
• One of the most durable surrealist objects that acts as a sexual emblem with the association of lips touching a hairy receptacle of warm fluid.

Giacometti - Suspended Ball - 1931

• Most achieved production of formlessness through the act of declassifying the the identification of both the wedge and ball forms.  Because both forms  manifest the sexual but still remain ambiguous as to which gender each form is representing specifically, the constant indecision renders the piece formless.
• The sexual act is also mimicked in the implied swing of the pendulum that the forms hang from. 
• Imagery of genital warfare in which the vagina is imagined as a trap and the penis as a knife and the act of love a mutal massacre.  This is strong in Picasso's Seated Bather, 1930.

Magritte - The Light of Coincidences - 1933

• Paintings were stories first, but not of slices of life or historical scenes.  They were snapshots of the impossible rendered n the most literal way.  A painting is not what it represents. 
• juxtaposed images of ordinary objects to create the illusion of mystery and the denial of fantasy. 
• Magritte was obsessed with the hold that language has on what it describes. The play between image and reality suggests that the real world is only a construction of mind (The Human Condition).  Nothing is certain and thought is the trigger to Magritte's visual boobytraps.  
• The representation of the marble sculpture is actually a painting itself, and while the light of the candle seems to illuminate it's dimension, in actuality it emphasizes it's flatness. 

Brancusi - The Beginning of the World - 1920

• Pursued forms of increasing simplification and purity.  Sense of perfection in mirror-like shine and polish. 
• Art Deco" marriage of primitivism and industrialization.  Brancusi's work slips into the revolving door of syle known as fashion :art industry. 

Matisse - Reclining Nude 1 (Aurora) - 1907

• Chooses 3 points of view because "can never see everything at once" and this enlarges the figure, crushes the torso and blocks access to the length of the belly. 
• Classical academic tradition calls for view of sculpture from one point of view, like Maillol's works, whereas Reclining Nude declares its necessary incompletness and teases our deisre for fullness-the very condition of modernity...less is more.

Matisse - The Serf - 1904, Cast 1907

• Marks the first serious engagement with Rodin's art and his definitive departure from it.
• The Serf is static and self-contained, the viewer is never tempted to animate it because it does not suggest any extention into mental or physical space.  In this way it asserts its autonomy as an object.
• The surface agitation comes close to destroying the integrity of the figure and physicality of the sculpture.
• Was a direct answer to Rodin's armless The Walking Man.  Matisse underlines his debt to Rodin and their differences. 

O'Keeffe - Ranchos Church, New Mexico - 1931

• The location in US makes a difference because there is no tradition to fall back on. 
• Abandoned images of production and consumption to salvage the lyrical subjectivity from the machine age.  She turned away from the city and discovered in the SW a relation to objects and images that reassurted, rather than overwhelmed, the body. 
• Charged an alternitive identity for American and women artists, one that departs from the machine age and myths of modernity.
• A male fantasy of self-creation of men born without a mother (Picabia) hovers over machine age art but O'keeffe recaptures self-creation for her own art of nature and challenges this male fantasy.

Demuth - Chimney and Water Tower - 1931

• Attempted to combine the precision associated with photography with an abstraction derived from Cubism.  The objects are not fragmented but the planar projections of them solidify the object, simplify the structure, and define its contour, and so clarify rather than complicate our vision. 

• This return to clarity and stability suggests a mechanistic way of seeing and it even worked to assimilate photography into painting.  Paintings based on photography might prove that cubism exists in nature and that photography can record it.  The withdrawl from the chaotic world in this simplification, creates an anxiety behind modernist abstraction.  While Strand remarked, "spiritual control over the machine" was the primary struggle of this generation. 

Davis - Blips and Ifs - 1964

• He evoked the urban life of the machine age but did so through symbols of consumption rather than through icons of production.  In a colorful style derived from Synthetic Cubism, he painted the city as a street poster of jazzy rhythms, surfaces, and signs.  He did so in a way that reclaims collage for painting and is neither disruptive of high art nor critical of mass culture. He displaced the machine, only to highlight the commodity in an artistic solution that forshadows Pop art.
• Saw jazz as the first american version of modernity, as spontaneous, to which European modernity has contributed nothing at all. 

Moholy-Nagy - Berlin - 1928

• Estrangement: making strange and play with distoriton.  Made the familiar unfamiliar. 
• Andre Malraux tried to define role and purpose of art in modern world.  Argues that photography serves to educate world about art beyond how we see it in person. 
• Photo as a medium was understood to provoke challenge of what it means to be an artist through thte different functions of photography as well as questioning the artist's hand.  Challenge to realistic painting.  
• Capacity of photo to capture precise detail and focus attention on individual object.  Education.  Question the idea of truth and reality. 

Blossfeldt - Impatiens Glandulifera; Balsamine, Springkraut - 1927

• How does photo redefine how we view art?  Here it can be said that Blossfeldt's macro vision of this plant abstracts it in such a way that because it becomes an object of primarily aesthtic beauty rather than scientific observation, it is more "artistic."  
• Walter Benjamin: Idea that the Aura is the quality of a work that makes it unique and fascinating.  Blossfeldt brings to attention the more underlooked details of an objects and highlights them in unique points of view that make them fascinating. 

Speer - Hitler's Reviewing Stand, Nuremberg - 1937

• Nazi decided that modern art is the enemy of the German people and that the idea of the artist in studio is antisocial.  Wanted strong images of strong Germans. This idea is almost theatrical because it is as if the Nazis themselves were illusionistic in their view of the perfect man or woman and also politics as a spectacle. 
• The Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937 wanted to show how sick, exaggerated, Jewish, and individualist modern artwork was to them.  Primitivism was seen to be leading society away from growth therefore germany and russia came to the same conclusion about art and became anti-modernist figures. 
• 2 ideologies: russian soviets emphasized CLASS as powerful and strong and the Germans emphasized RACE and were against Jes/slavs/Russians.

Picasso - Guernica - 1937

• There was a return to the figure in the 20's and 30's. 
• Inspired by an act of war, the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.  Cubist/Surrealist influence.
• Shows 4 women in terror.  A dismembered soldier lies on ground, a horse cries out in agony, and a bull stares us in the eye, these animals attest to the beasiality of the bombing.  Picasso holds debree together by the peramital massing of figures and the mutes range or B&W and gray.
• Goal is to transform own modernist inventions of cubist fragmentation and surrealist distortion into an expression of outrage.  This is a modernist art in service of political actuality. 
• The B&W and grey associate it with newspaper and synthetic cubism

Rivera - History of Mexico: From the Conquest to the Future - 1935

• Many hispanics were illiterate so it was important to use frescos in large visual murals for communication.  Rivera studied the Sistine Chapel. 
• Different episodes from history, very flattened.  Top imagery is of industrial future, equal rights, social justice, and each image builds on each episode of the past. 
• Was commissioned by Rockafellers for Rock Center of NY but ends up destroying it when Rivera refuses to remove Lenon.  Sign of how both are under pressure politically. 

Braque - L'Atelier III - 1949

• Cubist composition but focuses on richness of color and materials.. deep and luxurious (sand in oil).  Mystique of "the stuido"...the secular chapel (hughes).  Combo of ordinary and symbolic subjects. ex: bird, seemingly pure abstraction interwoven with chairs.
• Compare with Schwitters's Cathedral of Erotic mysery and it's installation inside his studio.  Similar to the secular chapel.
• Picasso about war, response to it.  Braque is more introverted, less of a direct connection, more about contemplation.  Frozen music.  Picasso did not have this serenity. 

Mondrian - Broadway Boogie-Woogie - 1943

• Most precise and concerned with detail.  Late mondrian = too dry, wants active and dynamic canvas.  Inspired by jazz in NY, this was a revelation to him in ways of the improvisation... gets rid of black bands that constrained the canvas previously.
• Regularity  and Irregularity creates back and forth and sense of rhythm.

Matisse - L'Asie (Asia) - 1946

• Fascination with non-european culture, the decorative, which speaks to his earlier influence of Islamic artwork.
• The Red Room influence of Islamic art. 

Matisse - Ivy in Flower - 1953

• Illness couldn't hold a brush so used cut paper.
• Sets up a new way of drawing with color using paper.
• Simple = freedom/lightness/experimentation
• Fascination/fear with concept of decorative.
• Pleasure/luxury = his paintings always give swense of sensual, physicality
• meditteranean culture = symbol of joy/carefree

Gorky - The Liver Is the Cock's Comb - 1944

• Exiled from Europe to NY because Nazi Germany destroyed capacity of Europe to be an avant-guard place and NY was growing and changing.
• Do not feel need to respond to European artists.
• Surrealism was the mvmt that transformed across the ocean.
• Surrealist exhibitions take over gallery and make the room the work of art itself.  Rlate to Proun Room=lizitssky
• Use approach of unconscious rather than rationality to appeal to emotion and feeling. 
• Studied Cezanne's brushstrokes, Matisse's degree of transparency, and Picasso's separation of masses/objects through contour lines. Saturated color from Kandinsky, biomorphic shapes from Miro/Arp.

Gorky - Untitled - 1948

• Leading into AB.EXP.

Newman - Vir Heroicus Sublimis - 1950

• Like Matisse, uses large expansive planes of color to suggest universal human experience.  Relate to WWII : having seen atomic bomb evoked a spiritual crisis, humans now have the capability to wipe life off the earth.  Interpretation: these artists aren't capable of having an idealized idea of humanity.
• "zips" = vertical lines, visual element that splits space into 1) moment of creation: heaven vs. earth 2) seeing with left eye vs. seeing with right eye. 
• Large painting so field of color fills up field of view, this is profound.

Pollock - Lavender Mist - 1950

• Harold Rosenburg comes up with concept of action painting.  Sees it as the next logical step in painting.  To create art as an act and a physical procedure.  This is significant. This allows the painting to become a record of the painter having made the act happen.
• Drip painting, canvas on floor, now all four sides are attainable. 
• Inspired by Mexican muralism by energy and power.  He learned the dripping from a workshop and studied under these muralists.

De Kooning - Excavation - 1950

• Art Brut: primitive/crude/rough.  Goal is to make art that looks like it's made by a child. Similar to surrealist wonder of child's world.
• Relate to Bacon and Debuffet who wanted to push themes and subject matter into a low, crude style.  i.e. animal side of human nature.
• Inspired by Cubism