art1100 lva 21_4 american modernism online

Art 1100

Joan Jonas“They Come to Us without a Word”U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2015

American Modernism

American Regionalism

Movement in American art that focused on local, representational subject-matter. “Regionalism” was the dominant style in American art during the 1930s and into the 1940s, often depicting scenes of the rural Midwest, American folklore, or the hard times during the Great Depression.

• Thomas Hart Benton, • John Steuart Curry• Grant Wood—all Midwesterners—are artists most commonly associated with Regionalism.However, the work of Stuart Davis and Edward Hopper could also be considered ‘Regionalist’, as they painted during the same period and drew on local sources for subject-matter, though in their case the focus was on city life.

Thomas Hart Benton: July Hay, egg tempera, methyl cellulose and oil on masonite, 965×679 mm, 1943 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art


Grant Wood: American Gothic, oil on beaver board, 1930 (The Art Institute of Chicago);


Grant Wood’s celebrated masterpiece American Gothic (1930) marked a complete stylistic break with his earlier output. The picture won a bronze medal at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930. It is one of the world’s best-known and most popular American paintings. The impetus for the painting came while Wood was visiting the small town of Eldon in his native Iowa. There he spotted a little wood farmhouse, with a single oversized window in the Carpenter Gothic style.

“I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house,” he said. He used his sister and his dentist as models for a farmer and his daughter, dressing them as if they were “tintypes from my old family album.” The image of the two hardy Puritan pioneers resonated with the lives and family histories of countless Americans.



Grant Wood: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, oil on masonite, 762×1016 mm, 1931 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wood, Grant Title Young Corn

Work Type Paintings (visual works) Date 1931

Location United States Style Period Regionalist (American Scene)

20th Century Description Oil on Masonite, 62x76 cm. Repository Cedar Rapids Art Association



Benton and art critic Thomas Craven were Regionalism’s most vocal advocates, often comparing Regionalist murals and paintings favorably against what they saw as élitist European abstraction, due to its relevance to a wider audience and its rootedness in local sources and more ‘authentic’ subject-matter.

The debate between Regionalism’s use of representation and abstraction did not end there, but rather heated up after World War II when art historian H. W. Janson wrote ‘Benton and Wood, Champions of Regionalism’, an essay which likened the conservative Regionalist style and cultural politics to Fascist art. A dismissal that became dogma for art critics, collectors, and historians for more than a generation.

Curry, John Steuart Title Tornado



20th Century Description Oil on canvas, 117.5x153.7 cm.

Repository Muskegon Museum of Art


Curry, John Steuart Title Hogs Killing Rattlesnake



20th Century Description Oil on canvas, 76.5x97.5 cm.

Repository Art Institute of Chicago


Armory Show [International Exhibition of Modern Art].

Held in 1913 in the 69th Regiment Armory in NY. This first large-scale show of modern art held in the USA resulted from the independent campaign of a group of progressive artists formed in 1912 to oppose the National Academy of Design and to broaden exhibition opportunities for modern American artists.

Arthur Davies, artist and president of the group, and Walt Kuhn were determined to present an international survey of Modern art. They succeeded in borrowing significant Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Fauve, and Cubist works from leading European artists and dealers. Although two thirds of the 1300 works included in the exhibition were by American artists, the European selections attracted the greatest attention and defined public perceptions of the show.

Popularizing Modernism in America.

International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show), installed at 69th Infantry Regiment Armory, New York City installation view 1 [Room H (foreign section)]Documentary photographs , 1913Exhibited at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street from February 15 through March 15, 1913


International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show), installed at Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois after it had traveled from NYC. installation view 1 [gallery 53]Documentary photographs, 1913

Exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago from March 24 through April 16, 1913; One of the galleries of the Armory Show as installed at the Art Institute of Chicago in March 1913. On the left are three of the seven works by Pablo Picasso included in the exhibition: "Landscape with Two Trees" (1907-1908, Philadelphia Museum of Art), "Madame Soler" (1903, Neue Pinakothek, Munich), and "Woman with Mustard Pot" (1909-1910, Gemeentemuseum, the Hague).


Alfred Stieglitz, Self-Portrait, 1907, platinum print.National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

The chief proponent of European Modern art in the United States was the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946).

Organized exhibitions of major Modern artists at a tiny gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue in NY, known simply as “291” founded with photographer Edward J. Steichen

As a photographer himself, he sought to establish the legitimacy of photography as a fine art with these exhibitions.

Originally called the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, it was founded to promote photography as an independent art form. In their first exhibition, Stieglitz and Steichen featured the work of the PHOTO-SECESSION group. However, their concentration on photography was brief, and they soon broadened the scope of the gallery to include exhibitions of avant-garde painting, sculpture, and graphic arts.


Alfred Stieglitz: From the Back Window, 291, platinum print, 251x202 mm, 1915 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949

Alfred Stieglitz, 291--Picasso-Braque Exhibition, 1915, platinum print.National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Stieglitz and 291 gallery.

Photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, at 291 Gallery, NY, in front of Marsden Hartley’s painting The Warriors.

The Stieglitz photograph, reproduced here, was featured in the Dada journal, The Blind Man, 2 May 1917.


Stieglitz, AlfredBrancusi Exhibition at Gallery 291, March to April, 1914Platinum print, 19.3x24.4 cm.Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)



Equally important to the popularization of European artists was Stieglitz’s promotion, through the gallery, of contemporary American artists. He staged the first exhibitions for Pamela Coleman Smith (1907), John Marin (1909), Alfred H. Maurer (1909), Arthur B. Carles, Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Max Weber (1910), Abraham Walkowitz (1912), Oscar Bluemner (1915), Elie Nadelman (1915), Georgia O’Keeffe (1916), and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1917).

O'Keeffe, GeorgiaPink No. 2, 1919Oil on canvas, 88.9x73.98 cm.Whitney Museum of American Art


Hartley, Marsden, 1877-1943.Painting no. 5, 1914-1915.39 1/2 x 31 3/4 inches.Whitney Museum of American Art.


Harlem Renaissance: A group of talented African-American artists and thinkers produced a sizable body of prominent works. The “Great Migration,” from the South brought numerous African Americans to Harlem in Northern Manhattan.

• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (1903) "twoness", a divided awareness of one's identity.• Founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)• The “Back to Africa" movement led by Marcus Garvey • The explosion of the arts particularly Jazz music, painting, dramatic revues and literature.

Harlem Renaissance

The nationwide “New Negro” movement called for greater social and political activism among African Americans.

The movement’s intellectual leader was Alain Locke (1886–1954), a critic and philosophy professor who urged artists and writers to explore themes of African American life and culture and to look beyond caricature and stereotyping in their works. The New Negro Editor: Alain

Locke, ed. Date: 1925 Medium: Bound book with printed illustrations Lender: National Portrait Gallery

Creation, 1935Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)

Harlem Renaissance

Locke argued that black artists should seek their artistic roots in the traditional arts of Africa rather than in mainstream American or European art.

Building More Stately Mansions, 1944Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)

Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas was the Harlem Renaissance artist whose work best exemplified the 'New Negro' philosophy. He painted murals for public buildings and produced illustrations and cover designs for many black publications including The Crisis and Opportunity.

The earliest African American painter consciously to incorporate African imagery in his work was Aaron Douglas, a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance and later. Other significant artists who contributed to the movement included Meta Vaux Fuller, Palmer Hayden, who painted satirical images of life in Harlem, William E. Scott (1884–1964), and Malvin Gray Johnson (1896–1934). The most important African American photographer of that period was James Van Der Zee, who photographed people and scenes in Harlem for more than 50 years and also served as the official photographer for the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey during his frequent parades and rallies in Harlem.

Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas ASPECTS OF NEGRO LIFE: FROM SLAVERY THROUGH RECONSTRUCTION1934. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

"...Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painting black...let's bare our arms and plunge them deep through 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 do the impossible. Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.”

- Aaron Douglas

Harlem Renaissance

Douglas, Aaron Scottsboro Boys c.1935 Harlem Renaissance Pastel on paper, 41x37.1 cm. Repository National Portrait Gallery

Harlem Renaissance

Harlem’s wealthy middle-class African- American community produced some of the nation’s most talented artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the jazz musician Duke Ellington, the novelist Jean Toomer, and the poet Langston Hughes and writer Ralph Ellison (author of The Invisible Man).

Harlem Renaissance

The Cotton Club, Harlem, New York

City, c. 1930.

Van Der Zee, James, Untitled [couple dressed in fur by a car]1932Harlem Renaissance ,B&w photograph

Harlem Renaissance

Van der Zee, James, 1886-Untitled, New York CityPhotograph

Harlem Renaissance

Archibald J. Motley Jr. (1891–1981), Blues, 1929. Oil on canvas, 36 × 42 in. (91.4 × 106.7 cm).

Harlem Renaissance

Archibald J. Motley Jr. (b. 1891–1981), Self-Portrait (Myself at Work), 1933. Oil on canvas,

57.125 × 45.25 in.

Harlem Renaissance

Motley consciously dedicated himself to the depiction of African Americans. Through his portraits and genre scenes, Motley created a visual legacy that extended the Harlem Renaissance beyond the boundaries of New York

Archibald J. Motley Jr., Brown Girl After the Bath, 1931. Oil on canvas, 48 1/4 × 36 in. (122.6 × 91.4 cm). Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio;

The Stock Market crash of 1929 brought the golden era of the Harlem Renaissance to an end and plunged the USA into the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Depression paralysed the nation’s economy, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Federal Art Project (1935–43), a division of the Works Progress Administration, which provided employment for many African American artists.

The most important national commission received by an African American artist during the 1930s went to the sculptor Augusta Savage, who created a large sculpture, The Harp (later called Lift Every Voice and Sing; painted plaster, h. 4.87 m) for the Negro Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair of 1939.

Harlem Renaissance

“The Harp” depicted twelve stylized Black singers of graduated heights that symbolized the strings of the harp. The sounding board was formed by the hand and arm of God, and a kneeling man holding music represented the foot pedal.

Savage, Augusta, 1892-1962Lift Every Voice and Sing, 1939plaster h. 16 ft

Augusta Savage in her studio working on a section of the sculpture "The Harp", created for the New York World's Fair (1939)1937 B&w photograph Sculpture based on "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by James Weldon and Rosamond Johnson

Harlem Renaissance

SAVAGE Augusta Christine, attributed to (1892--1962)., artistBust. Young black man. Marble.Height: 58.4 cm. (23 in.).

Harlem Renaissance

During and immediately after World War II, there arose to prominence a new school of African American artists, many of whom were the so-called ‘children of the Harlem Renaissance’. Such artists as Selma Burke, Charles White, and William H. Johnson, who had attracted attention before the war, continued their achievements.

Other prominent African American artists of this time were Jacob Lawrence, who painted highly colorful images of black life and history (e.g. the 60 gouache panels of the Migration of the Negro Northwards, 1941); Elmer Simms Campbell, who contributed illustrations for such periodicals as Esquire, the painters Romare Bearden, Eldzier Cortor, Frederick Flemister, and Horace Pippin, whose paintings included depictions of figures from the history of black emancipation.

‘children of the Harlem Renaissance’

Jacob Lawrence, (American, 1917-2000) The railroad stations in the South were crowded with people leaving for the North, 1940-41

Jacob Lawrence's landmark 1941 painting series of 60 images about the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North known as the Great Migration. Each image was a portion of the story and had a caption to go with it.


Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) Migration of the Negro: No. 3, 1940-1In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry.


Lawrence, Jacob, (1917-2000) Migration of the Negro: No. 5, 1940-1


“The South that was interested in keeping cheap

labor was making it very difficult for labor agents

recruiting Southern labor for Northern firms. In

many instances, they were put in jail and were forced

to operate incognito.”


“In the North the Negro had freedom to vote.”


Jacob Lawrence, (American, 1917-2000) And the migrants kept coming, 1940-41


http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/panel/1/intro

To see the full series of paintings go to…

Romare Bearden, The Payment of Judas, 1945-46


Romare Bearden, Conjur Woman, 1964

Romare Bearden, The Dove, 1964


American Modernism in Architecture

The Prairie school Term given to an American group of architects. Inspired by Louis Sullivan and led by Frank Lloyd Wright. Originally these architects were called the Chicago school, but in 1914 Wilhelm Miller, a professor at the University of Illinois, proposed the separate term, because of the visual associations with the broad, level character of the American prairie that he discerned in the residential work of many of these architects.

Modernist Architecture in America

Frank Lloyd Wright, (1867–1959)American.One of the most influential 20th century architects in the world.

Began in Oak Park with flat roofed, horizontal houses with and heavy overhangs that echoed the flat plains of the prairie in the Midwest.


His life’s achievement was largely centered on suburban and rural houses, renowned for their spatial integration with their surrounding environments, though his series of public buildings was unprecedented in their structural inventiveness.

Wright, Frank Lloyd, (US, 1867-1959) “Robie House”, Chicago: 1907-1909


The FREDERICK C. ROBIE HOUSE is one of Wright’s early masterpieces in the Prairie Style. It was designed around a central chimney (to radiate heat throughout the house in the bitter Chicago winter), and features a low, flat overhanging roof (to shade against the summer sun) with open porches for sleeping outside in the cool of summer nights.

The roof is dramatically cantilevered on both sides of the chimney. The windows are arranged in low bands around the house; many are stained glass, creating a colored screen between the interior of the house and the outside world while also inviting the viewer to look through the windows into the garden beyond.



Fallingwater, Edgar J. Kaufmann House, Mill Run, Pennsylvania, Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959), 1934-37

Frank Lloyd Wright’s

“Fallingwater”•Integrated architecture and nature

•Perched above a waterfall.

•Anchored to a large boulder, which serves in the interior as the central hearth and the symbolic core of domestic life.

•Made of stone from a nearby quarry.

As a great work of art, Fallingwater goes beyond its function as a house to meet a client's needs and symbolizes an American democratic ideal: to be able to live a free life in nature.

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=6459

Fallingwater, Edgar J. Kaufmann House, Mill Run, Pennsylvania, Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959), 1934-37


Sleek cantilevered balconies of reinforced concrete, made possible by modern engineering, seem to float effortlessly, if precariously, over the water. Their shape echoes the stepped rock ledges in the stream. An outdoor staircase suspended from below the living room leads to the plunge pool below.

Fallingwater embodies Wright's deeply held values about the underlying unity of humans and nature, which is reflected in his selection of building materials. As a great work of art, Fallingwater transcends its function as a house to meet a client's needs and symbolizes an American democratic ideal: to be able to live a free life in nature.


American System-Built Houses for The Richards Company., Model D101, project, Exterior perspective Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959) c. 1915-17

Frank Lloyd Wright's "System-Built Houses"-low-cost houses assembled from factory-produced elements.



Frank Lloyd Wright, The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1957-59.

After World War II, Wright’s career dramatically expanded until the end of his life, most notably in a series of major public buildings.

The most famous of these is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1943–59) in New York City. Its main gallery as a continuous spiral ramp around a central circular rotunda further demonstrated the potential of the cantilever principle realized in steel-reinforced concrete. The Guggenheim Museum was the most influential of Wright’s late buildings, especially on later art museums by architects


art1100 lva 21_4 american modernism online

Art & Photos