Modern Art- North America

1. Modern Art- North America ABSTRACTION

2. Georgia O’KeefeCountry- AmericanMovements-. Abstraction but first painted representationally , minimalistMedia- Oil, watercolour • Major Style and Contribution to Art • Early subjects were gigantic close-up paintings of flowers or flower parts, she felt people would be startled and have to look at them • Painted nature’s abstract forms • a modernist who used minimalism and anticipated the reductivism of the 1970s. In her long career, O'Keeffe focused on nature as well as man-made works, but rarely painted living creatures or people. She used bright colors, and created more than a hundred often giant-sized flower paintings, such as “Black Iris” (1926) and “Red Poppy” (1927). She also painted fragments to represent a whole, like the hole in a pelvis, or a single wall. She created large paintings of desert scenery, and focused on close-up views of a single blossom or object, such as a cow's skull. She sometimes juxtaposed otherwise unrelated objects, such as flowers and bones, e.g., “Horse’s Skull with White Rose” (1931).

3. Interesting Fact- Stieglitz ((the important photographer and influential promoter of modern art, and O’Keefe’s married lover), inspired by the strength and beauty of O'Keeffe's face and body, photographed her nude. In 1921, many of these photos were first exhibited in New York at his gallery, and caused quite a sensation. In 1924, he and O’Keeffe married after Stieglitz was granted a divorce by his first wife. • Near the end of her career, she commented: "Filling a space in a beautiful way. That is what art means to me."

5. Red, White, and Blue (1931) is among her earliest studies of a single animal bone isolated from its natural environment. The interesting shapes and textures of the bones and their natural play of positive form and negative space repeatedly inspired her to depict them. She saw in their jagged edges, worn surfaces, and pale colour the essence of the desert — a beauty that was enduring and untouchable. • O'Keeffe was able to create compositions of extraordinary simplicity that can be appreciated on many levels. "Red, White, and Blue" is masterful, both as an eloquent abstraction of form and line and as a richly symbolic image that raises issues of nationalism and religion. The compositional arrangement is starkly simple. The skull, precisely modeled and strictly frontal in its placement, becomes an image of great mystical power, like a sacred relic. The religious connotation is reinforced by the cross configuration of the extended horns and vertical support (probably the tree or easel upon which the skull was hung.

6. Charles DemuthCountry- AmericanMovements-. Abstraction, Precisionists, earlier works cubist watercoloursMedia- Oil, watercolour Major Style and Contribution to Art • series called posters portraits , made up of images and words and lettering associated with friends • influenced by advertising signs on buildings and along highways • The Figure Five in Gold (1928) -oil on composition board (91 x 75 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art • Based on a poem by his friend William Carlos Williams (The Great Figure):Among the rain/and lights/I saw the figure 5/in gold/on a red/fire truck/moving/tense/unheeded/to gong clangs/siren howls/and wheels rumbling/through the dark city. “Bill” and “Carlo” appear in the cubist design along with the roaring no.5, buildings tilt in space, rays of colour-light sweep across the middle distance and foreground, tying together the painting.

7. Calder

8. REALISM (1900- 1950) • After the Armoy show many American artist swung from Realism to Abstraction but many continued to work with realism. • They were called American Scene Painters, and included Edward Hopper and Walt Kuhn. They painted America as a vast beautiful, abundant, lonely, crowded and full of honest, hard-working people. • Another group, from the Midwest, were called Regionalist because they painted subjects near to the place they lived (Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton). • Grant Wood painted the icon of American culture American Gothic, about a simple rural farm couple which leaves a lasting impression.

9. Inspired by American Gothic

10. Social Realism • During and after the Great Depression in the early 1930’s • Periods of mass unemployment, hard times; fear of totalitarianism, socialism and communism • Many artists rejected abstraction and realism, and attacked the dehumanization of industrial and urban life • They used their art to influence government and focused on ordinary people and injustice • Led by Ben Shahn and Reginald Marsh and latter by Jacob Lawrence and George Tooker

11. Jacob LawrenceCountry- American Movements-. Social Realism Media- Tempra on Paper • Influences- Studies art at the government sponsored Harlem Art workshop from 1932 to 1934 • Interesting Fact- Quote-“ It is more important that an artist study life than study the technique of painting exclusively. Technique will come with the desire to make oneself understood. It is more important for the artist to develop a philosophy and clarity of thought.” • “Maybe ... humanity to you has been reduced to the sterility of the line, the cube, the circle, and the square; devoid of all feeling, cold and highly esoteric. If this is so, I can well understand why you cannot portray the true America. It is because you have lost all feeling for man.... And your work shall remain without depth for as long as you can only see and respect the beauty of the cube, and not see and respect the beauty of man-every man.”

12. Migration of the Negro # 3 (1941) Tempra on gesso on composition board • Tempra on gesso on composition boardThe Migration Series, one of the most well known paintings by Jacob Lawrence, was created when Lawrence was just 23 years old. Here, African Americans are shown leaving the South to go to the urban cities in the North.

13. One of the Largest Race Riots Occurred in East St Louis (1940-1941) Tempra on gesso on composition board- MoMa • Not realistic but stylized with perfect balance dance of almost abstract shapes • Dominated by clenches fist holding a knife

14. "The memory of them is plain in Number 57, "The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South", with its single figure of a laundress in a white smock, stirring a vat of fabrics - blue, black, yellow, pink - with her pole: a dense and well-locked composition, suggesting the permanence and resistance which is one of the underlying themes of Lawrence's

15. ART FROM THE FIFTIES TO THE PRESENT • in new York following WWII. • It was abstract (emphasizing shape, colour and/or/line with no recognizable subject matter) and expressive (expressed emotions and individual feelings more than design and form) • Influenced by Kadinsky and Gorky, as well as, other artists fleeing Hitler’s Germany • Called action painting • Abstract Expressionists wanted to release and express thoughts and ideas trapped in their sub-conscious. They also believed that the act of creating was as important as the content of the work

16. Jackson Pollock (1912-56)Country- American Movements-. Abstract Expressionism after going through realistic and abstract periodsMedia- oil enamel and found materials on canvas • Major Style and Contribution to Art- Drip painting-technique in which the artist walks over a canvas with a can of paint, dripping and spilling paint about the canvas • They were not haphazard, there was an interchange between the “will” of the paint and the inner forces of the artist • his aim was "to get into my painting and become a part of it ... a painting has a live of its own. It is only when I lose contact with it that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take and the painting comes out well". • Pollock's name is also associated with the introduction of the All-over style of painting which avoids any points of emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas and therefore abandons the traditional idea of composition in terms of relations among parts. The design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas -- indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image.