History of 20th Century Art

1940 - 1949

The Rothko Chapel, Houston, Tx.

1942 – American artists & critics distance themselves from Marxism and politically-driven avant-garde aesthetics

• Recreation of destroyed mural in Rockefeller Center, New York• Demonstrates Rivera’s Marxist beliefs and aversion to U.S. capitalism• Juxtaposes opposing ideologies (militaristic U.S. & Communist Russia) with man, the

worker, at center• Among recognizable portraits (Lenin, Marx), Leon Trotsky is included• Rivera and wife Frida Kahlo provided refuge for Trotsky while living in Mexico in exile

Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934, fresco, Museu del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

• Breton met Trotsky in Mexico

• Together they wrote a manifesto entitled “Toward a Free Revolutionary Art” in 1938 (though it was signed by Breton and Rivera)

• It called for an International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art

• Influential on Greenberg’s ideas, which aligns emerging American abstraction with the mural movement and surrealism

Man Ray, Andre Breton, 1930

“the struggle for revolutionary ideas in art must begin with the struggle for artistic truth, not in terms of any single school, but in terms of the immutable faith of the artist in his own inner self.” -Leon Trotsky

Hans NamuthClement Greenberg outside Jackson Pollock’s studio, 1951

Surrealism and Abstraction

• Breton, (the “Pope of surrealism”), championed artists who continued in the surrealist tradition

• Breton prefaced an exhibition of Paalen’s “fumages” (touching a smoking candle to primed surface)

• Akin to surrealist automatism and Max Ernst’s techniques: frottage (rubbing, usu. on wood grain) and grattage (scraping paint off canvas laid over objects)

• Discovery of latent images like surrealist “objective chance”

Wolfgang Paalen ,Ciel de Pieuvre(Octopus Sky), 1939fumage and oil on canvas

Max Ernst, Forest, 1927-28, grattage and oil on canvas

1942 – The Anxiety of Influence: Modernism Moves Stateside

• Group portrait from Artists in Exile show at Pierre Matisse Gallery, NYC

• Includes Breton, Ernst, Chagall, Mondrian, Tanguy, Leger, Matta, etc

• Many had fled Europe following persecution by Nazi regime

• Many given retrospectives and one-man shows in American museums around this time

• The New York School of American modernist painters indebted to these artists

Artists in Exile, March 1942, New York

Andre Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1926, sand,

gesso, oil, etc

A Few New Surrealist Recruits

• A Chilean painter

• Initially studied architecture

• Applied this to his “inscapes” (a kind of landscape of the mind) inspired by psychoanalysis

• Also influenced by world politics and disastrous events of war

• Biomorphic (cosmic and organic) & mechanomorphic abstraction

• Linear perspective suggested, but interrupted

• Later expelled from Surrealist group by Breton

Roberto Matta, Years of Fear, 1941-42, oil

"I am interested only in the unknown”-Matta

Yves TanguySuffering Softens Stones

1948oil

A Few New Surrealist Recruits

• Gorky fled Armenian Genocide in 1915 with mother and sisters

• Mother later died of starvation• Arrived in U.S. in 1920• Changed name to reinvent identity• Endured series of tragedies and ultimately committed

suicide

Arshile Gorky, Artist and his Mother 1926-36

• Style influenced by Matta (e.g. thinning paint)• Also influenced by Miro, Picasso, Kandinsky• Allowed Breton to title his works, but never became official Surrealist

Gorky, T

he Liver is the Co

ck’s Com

b, 1944

1943 – Harlem Renaissance

• James A. Porter’s Modern Negro Art is published

• Presented a history of African-American art from its beginning

• Lawrence represents in serial form Great Migration from South to North between WWI & WWII for those seeking economic opportunities and escape from racist Jim Crow laws

• When published in Fortune mag, solidified his reputation

• Renaissance also nurtured by nationalist and separatist ideas of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey (“return to origin” beliefs)

• W.E.B du Bois’s beliefs in unity, racial pride, and parity with white Americans most influential

• Art should express this vision

Jacob Lawrence, from The Migration of the Negro, 1940

Jacob Lawrence

Pool Parlor 1942

1943 – The “New Negro”

• Identity of “New Negro” (Alain Locke) shaped by African heritage as seen through lens of European modernism

• To re-envision “primitive” aesthetics as sources of national pride & identity

• A reconsideration of the aestheticized and fetishized mask

• Painted while artist was in Paris

Lois Malliou-Jone

s, Les Fe

tiches, 1938

Detail from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

1907

Imaging the “New Negro”

• Van der Zee was the premier photographer of Harlem Ren.

• Styled and retouched own portraits (painted backdrops, etc)

• To show positive portraits of prosperous African-Americans in NYC during the

Harlem Ren.James Van Der Zee, Family Portrait, 1926

Lorna Simpson, 9 Props1995, photo on felt

• Had vases in vanDer Zee’s photos recreated• Photographed them isolated with text on felt• Modernist examination of the construction of Black identity

Picturing Black Identity

Seydou Keita, Man with Flower, 1959/1998 Kehinde Wiley, from Black Light, 2009

A “Visual Vocabulary for Black America”?

• Considered “official” artist of Harlem Ren.

• Work shows hybrid aesthetic

• Teacher Winold Reiss (Art Deco artist) encouraged his interest in tribal art forms and European modernism (cubism)

• Shared Precisionist interest in clean lines and American landscape?

• Most acclaimed project was his mural series Aspects of Negro Life, painted for WPA in 1934

Aaron Douglas, The Creation, 1935, oil on masonite

Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Let’s bare our arms and plunge them deep through the laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough neglected. Then let’s sing it, dance it, write it, paint it…Let’s create something transcendentally material, mystically objective, Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.

1945 - The Aftermath of World War II

Shogo Yamahata, Nagasaki, 1945

Abstraction & The Sublime

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1809

1947 – The Irascibles

• Now known as Abstract Expressionists, this group didn’t receive its name until 1952

• They banded together in reaction to a juried exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 due to what they call the Met’s “hostility to advanced art”

• This photo published in Life magazine in Jan 1951 and joint letter of protest published on front page of the New York Times in May 1950

• Includes Smith, Baziotes, Gottlieb, de Kooning, Motherwell, Newman, Pollock, Rothko and Still

• Though grouped together stylistically, not a cohesive movement; each had own idiosyncratic mark

• 1947 watershed year (Pollock’s first drips, de Kooning solo show, etc)

Nina Leen, The Irascibles, 1950

In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope—to find that painting did not really exist…The awakening had the exaltation of a revolution. It was that awakening that inspired the aspiration…to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before. It was that naked revolutionary moment that made painters out of painters.

-Barnett Newman

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937

• Many worked for Works Progress Administration under FDR during 1930s• Most aligned with radical politics, including the Communist party• Debated the relationship between art and politics (having had been aware of and inspired by Picasso’s Guernica)• Some influenced by the Mexican muralists & American regionalists• An enthusiasm for and rejection of surrealism (rejection of the surrealist emphasis on narrative and retaining the surrealist interest in primitivism and psychoanalysis)• A collective feeling of inferiority in the face of European modernism• Exposure to European modernism in NYC

1947 – The Irascibles

From the Automatic to the Autographic

How do we make sense of “American-type” painting?

De Kooning, Untitled, 1948-49, oil

“Individual plight against Americanconsumerism”? -Schapiro

“freedom and

engagement of the self” ?

A record of the artist’s performance or presence?

The New York School

Robert Motherwell, At Five in the Afternoon, 1949

Mark Rothko, No. 3/No.13 (Magenta, Black, Green and Orange), 1949

• Title taken from a refrain in a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, lamenting the death of a bullfighter• From his Elegy to the Spanish Republic Series, 140 paintings begun in 1948

• Pollock received one-man show at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949

• With Pollock’s ascent, AbEx became mainstream

• Exported as American cultural policy under Marshall Plan (post-War European Recovery Program)

• Synonymous with new American “freedom” during Cold-War

• An American art?

1949 – Jackson Pollock: “Is he the greatest living painter in the US?”

Life magazine , 1949

1949 – A Melting Pot Aesthetic?

Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (No. 30), 1950, oil and enamel

1949 – A Melting Pot Aesthetic?

• Hybrid style influenced by Surrealism (automatism), Regionalism (the American heartland, the frontier), Native American art, Mexican muralism (in scale – Siquieros), etc.

• Pollock studied briefly with the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton

• Studied Jungian psychoanalysis (the collective unconscious) beginning in 1939

• Rejected European refinement or “French cooking” (“F*@k Picasso!”)

Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-35

Thomas Hart Benton, Arts of the West, 1932

Pollock, Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, 1943

Action! Painting

• Began to drip house paint on unstretched canvas on his barn floor in 1946-47 (in rural Long Island, NY)

• Relinquished authorship? Gravity and viscosity determine the works to a large degree

• By abandoning brush to canvas, he broke with traditional

painting

• By 1953, broke with

drip process & figures

returned

• Died in car crash in 1956

When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I am doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about…painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through’ - Pollock, from Possibilities, 1947

Hans Namuth, Photograph of Jackson Pollock painting, 1950

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cgBvpjwOGo

“A Mass of Tangled Hair”?: Understanding Pollock

Hans NamuthClement Greenberg outside Jackson Pollock’s studio, 1951

to render substance entirely optical and forms as an integral part of ambient space—this brings anti-illusionism full circle. Instead of the illusion of things, we are now offered the illusion of modalities; namely, that matter is incorporeal, weightless, and exists only optically like a mirage.

-Greenberg on modernist painting

massive crypto-landscapes -TJ Clark

anti-form -Robert Morris