MID-20th CENTURY STYLES
Modernism
-The US lives up to its name as a refuge of freedom (refugees and especially scientific and liberal arts leaders)
-See Fleming, p. 630
-291 Fifth Avenue (New York)
-1907 showings of Cézanne, Picasso, Brancusi etc.
-Georgia O’Keefe Radiator Building- Night, New York 1927
-Abstract expressionism; logical successor of impressionism, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism
-New York School: delineated abstract expressionists and NY counterparts of 1945-60s.
-"Modernism first and foremost was a group of styles in opposition to the then-prevailing middle class establishment values and the way art was taught in the schools and academies." (Fleming, p. 630)
-But modernism soon becomes the establishment
-similar thing happens to impressionists…
-Recall: Mercuse the Neo-Marxist from Marxist commentary (~2 weeks ago)
-reverse migration around WWII; international style now is home in NYC
Abstract Expressionism
-Insisted on spontaneity, emotional intensity; vast range of individual emotions, choices, and materials
-Existentialism (with its insistence upon radical subjectivity), abstractionism fulfilled?, surrealism fulfilled?
-worked with essence of pictorial space, which was flatness (like cubists!)
-no attempt to create illusion of deep space or rounded forms.
Action Painting
-Pollock
-Ryder
-Franz Kline
Surrealism and abstract expressionism
Color-Field Painting
Color abstractionists: Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman
-distinction b/t color abstractionists and action painters (Fleming, p. 639)
Mid-Century Sculpture
David Smith
Serialism
-one needs many works, perhaps, to tell a perspectival story
-movement traces to Monet: 1877
-Joseph Albers Homage to the Square: process not finality!
-Frank Stella Tuftonburo I: pictures need not conform to predetermined geometric shape
-Spillover effect (e.g., Brunelleschi’s Sacrifice of Isaac from Ch. 9) seems different. Why?
Minimalism
Sculpture achieves highest value when fashioned to assimilate with environment
Period of Fragmentation in the Arts
-Christo Surrounded Islands
-Is the art in the process of working out details?
-Christo’s work requires that the details be worked out by different entities
??4) Performance art
Architecture for Humans: Frank Lloyd Wright (video excerpts)
-Falling Water, Pennsylvania
-Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
-The museum: what is its function? How does it contribute to the aesthetic experience? Might it be like a frame is to a painting? Can it make art (cf. Duchamp’s Fountain)? What about the demographics of museumgoers?
Existentialism and Death
Waiting for Godot
Martin Heidegger’s concept of "Being-Towards-Death"
Fleming (p. 664): "In life there is always the immanent presence of death"
Albert Camus:
-"Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive…I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it…everyone lives as if no one ‘knew.’ This is because there is no experience of death."
(from the Myth of Sisyphus, translated by J. O’Brien)
-the cruel mathematics: everybody dies
-the subjective truth: we will die
-the subjective experience: Epicurus-when I exist, death does not; when death exists, I am not
: Heidegger- we are beings-toward-death