Modernism and Post-modernism in Europe and America
@@terms@@
==artworks==
descriptive terms/styles and innovations
%%Purpose (Function), Meaning and Intended Audience%%
^^dates/events^^
Painting, Sculpture, and Photography
Post-war Expressionism in Europe
Background Information
@@existentialism@@::a philosophy asserting the absurdity of human existence and the impossibility of achieving certitude
promotion of @@atheism@@
“if God does not exist, then individuals must constantly struggle in isolation with the anguish of making decisions in a world without absolutes or traditional values
emergence of @@pessimism@@ and despair, brutality or roughness
Alberto Giacometti
Nationality:: Swiss
Time → 1901 - 1966
Works:
==Man Pointing No. 5==
Francis Bacon
Nationality → British
Time → 1910 - 1992
Works:
==Painting==
Abstract Expressionism
Background Information
World War II’s devastation sent artists fleeing to the United States
The center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York
Representational art disappears
@@formalism@@::an emphasis on an artwork’s visual elements rather than it’s subject
@@gestural abstraction@@::reliance on the expressive of energetically applied pigment
@@chromatic abstraction@@::reliance on color’s emotional resonance
Arshile Gorky
Nationality → Armenian
Time → 1904 - 1948
History:
Four years old when his father escaped being drafted into the Turkish army by fleeing the country
His mother died of starvation when he was 15
Made his way to America in 1920, penniless and settled in New York four years later.
Works:
==Garden in Sochi==
Jackson Pollock
Nationality → American
Time → 1912 - 1956
History:
Nicknamed Jack the Dripper
painted on the floor
@@gestural abstraction@@
Works:
==Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)==
Lee Krasner
Nationality → American
Time → 1908 - 1984
History: Wife of Jackson Pollock
Major Painter
Works:
==The Seasons==
Willem de Koonig
Nationality → Dutch-born
Time → 1904-1997
History:
gestural abstraction
his wife Elaine was also a painter
Works:
==Woman, I==
Mark Rothko
Nationality → Russian-born
Time → 1903 - 1970
History:
chromatic abstraction
%%focused on the spiritual reality%%
Works:
==No. 14==
Post-Painterly Abstraction
Introduction
@@Post-Painterly Abstraction@@::a term coined by Clement Greenberg
another postwar American Art movement that developed out of Abstract expressionism but with a very different sensibility
characterized by detached rationality emphasising tighter pictorial control, versus Abstract Expressionism’s focus on intense passion
Frank Stella
Nationality → American
Time → b. 1936
History:
works characterized by thin, evenly spaced pinstripes on colored grounds
@@hard-edge painting@@
Works:
==Mas o Menos (more or Less)==
Helen Frankenthaler
Nationality → American
Time → 1928-2011
History:
@@color-field painting@@::emphasized painting’s basic properties
color-field painters poured diluted paint onto unprimed canvas and allowed the pigments to soak in.
Works:
==The Bay==
Op Art
Introduction
@@Op art@@ was a major artistic movement of the 1960s
%%sought to produce optical illusions of motion and depth%% using only geometric forms on flat surface.
Bridget Riley
Nationality → Britain
Time → b. 1931
History:
was featured in the December 1964 issue of Life magazine.
Works:
==Fission==
Abstraction in Sculpture
Introduction
%%sculptors focused on three-dimensionality as the essential characteristic and inherent limitation of the sculptural medium.%%
David Smith
Nationality → American
Time → 1906-1965
History:
sculpture that has an affinity with the Abstract Expressionist movement in painting.
%%intended to be seen in the open air%%
Works:
==Cubi==
Donald Judd
Nationality → American
Time → 1928 - 1994
History:
a leader of the @@minimalist@@ movement
minimalist artworks generally lack identifiable subjects, colors, surface textures, and narrative elements.
%%rejected illusionism and emphasized “objecthood” and concrete tangibility%%
Judd produced most of his major works in NYC
Works:
==Untitled==
Louise Nevelson
Nationality → Russian-born
Time → 1899 - 1988
History:
combined architectural fragments with the power of Dada and Surrealist found objects.
created works out of found objects, wood objects, and various forms with monochromatic color schemes, usually black, white, or gold.
Works:
==Tropical Garden II==
Louise Bourgeois
Nationality → French-American
Time → 1903 - 1970
History:
%%sculpture is connected with the body’s multiple relationships to landscape%%
Works:
==Cumul I==
Pop Art
Introduction
Some artists sought to harness the communicative power of art to reach a wide audience
@@Pop art@@ is born
Pop art can be traced to the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London which was ^^founded in 1952.^^
Richard Hamilton
Nationality → Britain
Time → 1922 - 2011
History:
trained as an engineering draftsman, exhibition designer, and painter
studied the way %%advertising shapes public attitudes%%
Works:
==Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?==
Jasper Johns
Nationality → American
Time → b. 1930
History:
moved to NYC in 1952
pivotal to the early development of American Pop Art
%%attempted to draw attention to common objects in the world--what he called things “seen but not looked at”%%
Works:
==Three Flags==
Robert Rauschenberg
Nationality → American
Time → 1925 - 2008
History:
a close friend of Jasper Johns’s
created mass-media images
made multimedia works that he called @@combines@@, which intersperse painted passages with sculptural elements
Works:
==Canyon==
Roy Lichtenstein
Nationality → Britain
Time → 1923 - 1997
History:
born in Manhattan near Madison Avenue, the center of the American advertising industry
Works:
==Hopeless==
Andy Warhol
Nationality → American
Time → 1928 - 1987
History:
the quintessential American Pop artist
had an early successful career as a commercial artist and illustrator
often depicted icons of mass-produces consumer culture
Works:
==Green Coca-Cola Bottles==
Claes Oldenburg
Nationality → Swedish-born American
Time → b. 1929
History:
sculptural Pop art that %%incisively commented on American consumer culture%%
graduated from Yale in 1950
Works:
==Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks==
Super-realism and Photography
Introduction
@@Super-realists@@ expanded Pop’s iconography by making images that mimicked reality as faithfully as possible. Also known as @@photo-realism@@.
Audrey Flack
Nationality →American
Time → b. 1931
History:
intrigued by the formal and technical qualities of photography
used projectors and airbrushes
typically included multiple references to death
Works:
==Marilyn==
Chuck Close
Nationality → American
Time → b. 1940
History:
had facial blindness
Works:
==Big Self-Portrait==
Lucian Freud
Nationality → German-born Brit
Time → 1922 - 2011
History:
moved to London in 1933 when Hitler became the German chancellor.
grandson of Sigmund Freud
best known for his unflattering close-up view of faces
Works:
==Naked Portrait==
Duane Hanson
Nationality → American
Time → 1925 - 1996
History:
perfected a casting technique that enabled him to create life-size sculptures that many viewers mistake at first sight for real people
Works:
==Supermarket Shopper==
Minor White
Nationality → American
Time → 1908 - 1976
History:
in 1938 became a photographer for the Works Progress Administration
served in the US Army in World War II
settled in NYC where he met Alfred Stieglitz
sought to incorporate a mystical element in his own work
Works:
==Moencopi Strata==
Feminist Art
Judy Chicago
Nationality → American
Time → b. 1939
History:
born in Chicago
cofounder of the %%Feminist%% Art Program in California
originally conceived The Dinner Party as a feminist Last Supper
Works:
==The Dinner Party==
Cindy Sherman
Nationality → American
Time → b. 1954
History:
primarily worked with photography
%%addresses the “male gaze”%%
produce photographs showing herself designing, acting in, directing, and photographing the works.
Works:
==Untitled Film Still #35==
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Nationality → Poland
Time → b.1930
History:
A fiber artist.
leader in the exploration of the expressive powers of weaving techniques in large-scale artworks.
early life, she was a member of an aristocratic family disturbed by the dislocations of World War II and its aftermath
Works:
==80 Backs==
Architecture and Site-Specific Art
Introduction
The postwar period of architecture included Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. At the same time, younger architects began to rise to international prominence and post-modern architecture began to form
Modernism
Introduction
modernist architects stressed formalist simplicity in buildings adhering to a rigid geometry as well as buildings featuring organic sculptural qualities
Frank Lloyd Wright
created the ==Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum== and ==Fallingwater== (see required works)
Le Corbusier
created ==Villa Savoye== (see required works) and ==Notre-Dame-du-Haut==
Mies van der Rohe
A minimalist architect. Created the ==Seagram Building== (see required works) with Philip Johnson (1906-2005)
Postmodernism
Introduction
postmodernism began within a few years of the completion of the Seagram building
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs, 1961)
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Robert Venturi (b. 1925)
They argued that the uniformity and anonymity of modernist architecture were unsuited to human social interaction
%%Postmodern architects accepted and embraced the messy and chaotic nature of big-city life%%.
Michael Graves
1934-2015
designed ==The Portland Building==
an early maker of postmodernist innovation that borrowed from the lively, garish language of pop culture
Rogers and Piano
British architect Richard Rogers (b. 1933)
Italian architect Renzo Piano (b. 1937)
Designed the ==Georges Pompidou National Center of Art and Culture in Paris.==
color-coded pipes, duct, tubes, and corridors according to function.
Environmental and Site-Specific Art
Introduction
also known as @@earthworks.@@
emerged in the 1960s
most environmental artworks are site-specific and in open air.
Coincided with the ^^ecology movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the creation of the EPA^^
Robert Smithson
(1938-1973)
best known for ==Spiral jetty== (see required works)
Performance and Conceptual Art and New Media
Performance Art
Introduction
Performance art replaces traditional stationary artworks with movements, gestures, and sounds performed before an audience, whose members sometimes participate in the performance
Anticipated the rebellion and youthful exuberance of the 1960s
Carolee Schneemann
Nationality → America
Time → b. 1939
History:
@@“kinetic theater@@”
radically transformed the nature of Performance art by introducing a %%feminist dimension%% through the use of her body (often nude) to %%challenge gender stereotypes.%%
Works:
==Meat Joy==
Conceptual Art
Introduction
maintained that the “artfulness” of art lies in the artist’s idea, rather than in its final expression.
Joseph Kosuth
Nationality → America
Time → b. 1945
History:
operates at the intersection of language and vision
dealt with the relationship between the abstract and the concrete
%%pushed art’s boundaries to a point where no concrete definition of “art” was possible%%
Works:
==Three Chairs==
New Media
Introduction
Among the most popular new media were video recording and computer graphic
Video images combine the optical realism of photography with the sense that the subjects move in real time in a deep space “inside” the monitor
Nam June Paik
Nationality → Korean-born
Time → 1932-2006
History:
Studied music performance, art history, and Eastern philosophy in Korea and Japan
worked with electronic music in Germany in the late 1950s
relocated to NYC in 1965
Collaborated with the gifted Japanese engineer-inventor Shuya Abe (b. 1932) in developing a video synthesizer
he called his video works @@“physical music”@@
Works:
==Global Groove==
Required Works
135) Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier
139) Falling Water, Frank Lloyd Wright
145) Woman, I, Willem de Koonig
146) Seagram Building, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson
147) Marilyn Diptych, Andy Warhol
148) Narcissus Garden, Yayoi Kusama
149) The Bay, Helen Frankenthaler
150) Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, Claes Oldenburg
151) Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson
152) House in New Castle Country, Robert Venturi, John Rausch and Denise Scott Brown
Timeline of Movements
Abstract Expressionism (1940s-1950s)
Pop Art (1955-1960s)
Color Field Painting (1960s)
Conceptual Art (1960s)
Op Art (1960s)
Minimalism (1960s)
Site/Environmental Art (1970s-1990s)
Feminist Art (1970s-present)
Postmodernism (1975-present)
Video/Computer/Digital Art (contemporary)
Timeline of Historical Events
^^1947^^
the British left India, dividing the subcontinent into two hostile nations, India and Pakistan
^^1945^^
World War II ended, leaving devastated cities, ruptured economies, and governments in chaos throughout Europe.
^^1945 - 1980^^
Civil rights movement, university free speech, disengagement from Vietnam, the sexual revolution, rock music, drug abuse, feminism
^^1949^^
Communists came to power in China after a bloody civil war
^^1950^^
North Korea invaded South Korea
Independence and civil wars in African Nations
Civil war in Indonesia
^^1950s^^
the center of the Western Art world shifts from Paris to New York
^^1962^^
Algeria expelled France
America defeated in Vietnam.
^^1965-1967^^
the first inexpensive video recorder was made commercially available (the Sony Porta-Pak)
^^1969^^
The passage of the National Environmental Policy Act
^^1970^^
the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency
Purpose, Meaning, and Intended Audience
intended to be seen by everyone: in museums, private collections, specific places
often used as societal criticism or cultural awareness (i.e. feminism, global warming, war, consumerism, etc.)
Art was often times not for any specific reason other than to simply exist.
many times post-modernism experienced a mixed reception. It was often so strange and different that it was rejected at first, before becoming loved with the passage of time.
Materials
fiber
video cameras
photography
resin
burlap
oil paint
commercial paint
steel
titanium
various metals
prints
human bodies
the ready-made