Lecture 10 Notes: Modernism, Postmodernism, and African Art

Modernism and Postmodernism in Europe and America (1945-1980)

Continuation of European and American art and culture from 1945 to 1980.

Review of Modern Art Characteristics

Art rising from the public sphere, not private or church patronage.
Communication in commonly understood terms for the public.
Art produced through the unique experience of the artist.
Artistic genius as a product of Romanticism.
Reflection of social and industrial changes with stress on observation and experience.
Devotion to modernity, focusing on real, visible, and familiar subject matters.
Rejection of traditional subject matters; images are straightforward and challenge conventions.
Use of modern technologies like photography.
Concentration on subjects and experiences of modern life and modernity.
Fascination with tribal art of Africa and non-Western prehistoric people (Primitivism).
Strong consciousness of its own formal structure (art for art's sake).

Post-World War II Shift

Europe traumatized and in ruins after World War II (ended in 1945).
Shift of the center of modern Western art to The Americas, especially North America (The US).
Influx of artists immigrating to The US.
Central Western art world shifted from Paris to New York in the 1950s.
Return to figurative painting in Europe to digest the impacts of the war.

Alberto Giacometti

Swiss artist whose sculptures evoked the despair of humankind after the world wars.
Criticized man's inhumanity to man through his personal style and statues.
Obsessed with working, constantly experimenting and never fully satisfied with his sculptures.
His work defined a new way of thinking about humanity after the war.
Depicted fragile, thin, extended figures, seen as epitomizing exhaustion, failure, and guilt on the part of humanity.
Femme de Venice (Women of Venice) series featured statuesque, powerful, poetic, and gentle figures of his wife, Annette.
Are the Trace is a surrealist construction made of metal, wood, and plaster, based on dreamlike images.
Four Figurines on a Base based on the memory of seeing four naked women at a distance the sense of them being engulfed in this space.

Francis Bacon

British artist reflecting the war's butchery of humanity in his paintings.
Central figures are dressed in the fashion of European and American officials at the center of the painting and raw meat sitting on the railing in his background as if he just devoured part of that meat.
Describes his art as an attempt to remark the violence of reality.
Refers to the brutality of this fact.
His paintings often express anger, pain, and distrust of life.
His work marked a break in English culture, with art becoming feral.
His paintings are not explained through the war, but they are informed by it.
He lived among torn and dirty surroundings, creating a wonderful and chaotic environment.

Abstract Expressionism

Artists explore the contents of tortured and collective unconscious through abstraction.
Response against emotional abstraction in the 1960s, leading to art centered on the object alone.
Abstract expressionism was the first major American avant-garde art movement.

Arshil Gurki

Armenian immigrant who arrived in New York in 1924.
His paintings inspired by childhood memories, such as his father's garden.
Example: MoMA painting inspired by his father's garden with apple trees and wild carrots.
Quote from Gorky: "My father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit. There was a ground constantly in shade where grew incalculable amounts of wild carrots and proccupins had made their nests."

Jackson Pollock

Exemplifies abstract expressionism, particularly gestural abstraction.
Energetically applied pigments on canvas to enhance expressiveness.
Technique involved splashing and throwing paint onto the canvas.
His art is about its own form and showing how it was made.
The art itself tells about its own process of creation.
Example: One, number 31, the nineteen fifty at MoMA.
Paint often landed on the canvas in intricate shapes and curves, thanks to the addition of boiled oil providing strings of paints.
Subversive art confronting ideas about skill, lines of energy, controlled chaos, and philosophical thoughts about the universe being controlled chaos.

Willem de Kooning

Dutch-born artist known for gestural abstract expressionism.
Displayed sweeping gestural brushstrokes to suggest vigorous interactions between the artist and canvas.
Intensity as a common theme in postwar arts.
Emphasis on the sweeping gesture for the people of a community to understand.
Woman, one (1950-1952) showcases De Kooning’s return to figurative art after a series of abstract paintings.
Layered physically with up to eighty paintings on it.
A muscular painter and the is the origin of the term action painting.
The work is layered in terms of people reading it differently: misogynist and then again as a critical look at the post World War two pinup.

Post-Painterly Abstraction

Developed out of abstract expressionism, but is about cool, detached rationality and tighter pictorial control.
Visible pigment applications and evidence of the artist's hands are absent.

Frank Stella

His artwork demonstrated the essential elements as the artist declared what you see is what you see.
Works insist on purity of visual elements, like line in art.
Central focus on purity in painting.
Exhibition retrospective covered decades of his work, artistic styles, and themes.
Radical implications seemed to banish not only illusionistic space, but any possibility of narrative or symbolic content.
Started out with black painting. progressed to shaped canvases. In 1970s and 80s he exploded into low, medium, and high reliefs.
Computer aided design, rapid prototyping, and three d printing was used at the age of the 80s.
Perceived as the father of minimalism. Continually looked for a new mode of expression to keep the history of the abstraction vital and relevant to modern viewers.

Op Art

Art that produces optical illusions of motion and depth through geometric forms on two-dimensional surfaces.
Goal: to produce a sense of disorientation and disturbance.
Depicts illusion of motion and depth.

Bridget Riley

Created illusions of a pulsating surface through varied sizes and shapes of black dots on a white background, and the proximity of undulating line created vibrations on the canvas.
Her goal was to actively engage the viewer as part of the process of making her art.
Riley activates the space between the artwork and the viewer.
The space between the spectator and the picture plane become active.
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Minimalism

Focuses on three-dimensionality as an essential characteristic in simple geometric forms.
Purity of form is emphasized with no texture or narrative elements (no subject matter).
Machine-produced forms.
About form, materials, and how the work is made, not what it represents.
Artists place concrete tangibility at the center of their art.
Rejection of emotion and overt symbolism. Forms often repeated in non-hierarchical arrangements, rejecting compositional balancing.
Objects aren't pointing to anything or referencing anything.

Tony Smith

One of the predominant sculptors of this language.
The artwork lacks texture and narrative elements.
This is all about form, materials and production (not representation).

Donald Judd

His 1969 untitled work made of brass and plexi that is mounted on a wall, replicates the same form over and over.
Gives instructions on how to hang it in a certain spacing so it can interact with its space.
Looks like an industrial metal but modern.

Pop Art

Encompassed fascination with different aspects of popular culture.
Emergence after around 1952 in London within a fresh thinking of art.
Highlights omnipresence in American Society.
Mass consumerism stands at the heart of this new artistic movement.

Andy Warhol

Selected icons of mass-produced consumer culture, like Coca-Cola bottles, to highlight its omnipresence.
Turned mass consumerism into the pulse of his own art.
Coca Cola three: Warhol's moment to want to do a painting of something that stands in for who we are as Americans.
Removing the artist's hands.
Making art tremendously accessible and democratic.
Takes the most iconic things and paints it in a way that removes the artist's hand.
His transition was by exploring iconic symbols and brands.
Campbell Soup Cans: Relocates mundane things and makes people pay attention.
The art is not necessarily based in technical skill.
His style was shocking and radical. Used a printed product to show mass manufacturing and the way we construct our world.
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Surrealism

An art that was scrupulously faithful to optical fact as it is obvious in its title. So it's very real and to the reality the way it really is.
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Dwight Hansen

American artist depictions of stereotypical average Americans of his own time
Specifically, interested in lower and middle class American types.
Intending to captures the emptiness and loneliness captures their existence and their true reality.

Feminist Art

Exploration of social dynamics of power and privilege, especially gender, racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation issues.
Feminist art and women artists gained prominence.
Focus on the social status of women in societies throughout history.

Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party: monumental installation permanently housed in the Brooklyn Museum near Pratt.
A 48-foot triangular dinner table made of ceramic, porcelain, and textile that celebrates women of Western civilization.
The women’s names are inscribed on the table and its glazed porcelain brick base.
It structures as a narrative through western civilization, which is presented through the lives of female heroes rather than men.
The plates rise up as one moves around the triangular table as a metaphor for liberation.
It reflects the current of history.
Women do not belong on the table.
Encountering a lack of support.

Cindy Sherman

Prominent artist during the time where women artists gained prominence.
Sherman uses photography as her primary means of expression.
The prominent theme in her work is how Western art presents female body for the enjoyment of the male gaze.
Sherman’s works explore gender as a socially constructed concept.
Her work is creativity, fun, and subversiveness
She uses costume, wigs, prosthetics, makeup, and clothing.
She uses digital practices of a camera to enhance her features to create various personas.
She thinks about painting of religious scenes, masterpieces, portraits of nobility, and recreated them.
She inhabits these characters and loses herself with there no sense of Cindy Sherman.

Modernism in Architecture

Formalism that stressed on simplicity.
Buildings retained organic sculpture qualities.
Adhere to more rigid geometry.
Combination of architecture and sculpture.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Guggenheim Museum in New York City
Designed something that would leave a mark in Manhattan
It’s ferrous concrete
It has an atrium that is cantilevered.
Wright had great drawings, a terrific model, and a patron with good funding. It was built for the museum of non objective art.
He wanted to break boundaries.

Le Corbusier

Pilgrimage church in France
Built for religious function and the building is a fusion of architecture and sculpture. The material is concrete and painted white.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Seagram Building. A sleak steel and concrete tower that is completed covered in bronze and mirror.
The Seagram building is an example of a building that looks sculpture.
Each pillar looks like fluted columns that rise from the base to the top.
Each elevator is wrapped in travertine. The building is really not using much of its footprint, is set back on Park Avenue, and provides an architectural experience.

Post Modernism

Postmodernism is complex and eclectic and often incorporates references to historical styles.
Rejection of modernism.
Admired purity, postmoderns welcomed ornamented walls or color paintings and symbolic references.

Philip Johnson

Incorporated in his skyscraper more granite than glass as well as a classical pediment.
A reference to base column and entablature system of classical architecture from an ancient Greece - Roman era.
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Charles Motts Piazza

Complex, electric that often incorporates references to historical styles.
Corinthian and Ionic Columns with a Roman arch and colorful painted walls.
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Site Specific Art

Manipulations of Earth and rocks.
Moves away from being isolated to galleries.
Accessible to people, surrounds people.
Suggests a symbolic meaning and does not refuse to minimalism. Art joins the life together.

Robert Smith Simthson

Earthworks:Spiral Jetty
Earth and rocks are manipulated incorporating industrial equipment and limestone.

Conceptual Art

The concept becomes the work of art.
Opposite of minimalism.
It’s the idea instead.
Dematerialization of an object.

Joseph Kasuth

Artists work with meaning. Construction and meanings are being employed in some way. We can utilize anything in the world in order to construct meaning.

Art and Culture in Africa (19th and 20th Centuries)

Early twentieth century guardian figure of the people of Northeast Gabon
Made to deposit the remains of their guardian figure
Sculpt in the box or basket with the ancestral relics.
Highly stylized with a body in form of an open diamond, holding a large wood head
With wood strips covered in brass.
Cota people believe the gleaming surfaces repels evil spirits.

Fang People of Gabon Guardian

Sculpted figures with visually emphasized heads to stress their power.
Designed to be placed on the edge of cylindrical boxes of ancestral relics.
Bodies in form of infants but with masculinity of an adult. Cycle of life.
They were nomadic or semi nomadic so it was important for Elder men in the community to engage and manage these relics
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Throne in Cameroon

Throne of King Joya from 185 is held in the Ethnological Museum located in Berlin

Dances and Mask in African Lives

Rituals and masquerades.
These costumes are giving meanings to their wearers.
Art is not something only for pleasure, it’s an essential party.
The kingship is essential here.
They are trying to fashion the world around it with prestige and wealth.
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Satambe Mask

Women are the first masqueraders. Is an important piece of the history of the people and ancestors that it involves itself with.
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Dogon Village traditions

Located in Komakan in Mali in preparations for a rare event and the preparation of the ceremonies.
Dhammas can be held only after a good harvest.
Every houshold offers millet to thank the spirits and the old men lead the ceremonies and act as the masters of ceremonies that show them the ways things should be for them.
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Costumes in Africa

Meaningful and messages transmitted by these clothes and are understandable and readable for the people of these communities.
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Kante Cloth Robe

Cloth made by the Asante and Ive people of Ghana. The King has the right to wear these, it shows his wealth, dignity, and military prowess.
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Body adornment.

The Samburg people of this rea for instance, have these type of distinct styles of personal decoration.
Also reveals parental status, is very revealing of the time status and age for the citizens of these tribes and traditions and shows much that they are associated with.