depression to pop

22

Upload: bassmanb

Post on 16-Jan-2015

769 views

Category:

Business


0 download

DESCRIPTION

 

TRANSCRIPT

Page 2: Depression To Pop

The Depression

Lange, Migrant Mother• Commissioned by the US

Government to photograph the Great Depression

• Came upon a deserted campground with a mother and her children living on frozen peas and dead birds

• Two children turn away so we can concentrate on the mother’s face

• Infant wrapped in rags• Look on face: strength, worry,

concern, fear• Documentary Photography

Page 3: Depression To Pop

Jacob Lawrence, Migration of the Negro 1941

•Series depicts the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to industrial North around World War I.

•Sixty panels in all

•Trains seen as the link the series, appearing in first and last paintings

•Improved social conditions of the North, comes at a price of overcrowding and prejudice

•Flattened grey background with tilted perspective

•Cubist shapes

•Few brushstrokes indicate facial features

•Little detail, simplicity and directness of message

Page 4: Depression To Pop

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks

•Motion is stopped, time suspended

•A solitary diner with huge plate glass windows and no visible street entrance

•Man and woman almost, but do not, touch

•Evocative lighting

•Vacant streets and storefronts

•Little communication

•People alone in a modern world

•Abstract emptiness of much of the painting

•Hawk: a bird that preys on others

Page 5: Depression To Pop

The DepressionGrant Wood, American

Gothic, 1930• Expressions of disapproval• Austere costumes, bibbed

overalls, starched shirts• Rural people• Window curtains echoed in

dress of woman• Pitchfork reflected in jeans

and shirt of farmer• Represents types artist

knew his whole life• Clear, precise, realistic

drawing

Page 6: Depression To Pop

The DepressionOrozco, Hispano-America• Painted in library of Dartmouth College• Mexican artists given to enormous fresco cycles• Mexican peasant, armed to the teeth, majestic; almost a stereotype• Beset by those who would corrupt him with money or arms• Bankers and soldiers are enemies of the common people• Education seen as a horrific image: academic robes carry a death face.

The books are painted similarly to the cannons• Cannons threaten him, a general raises a dagger• Factory buildings enslave free people• Very political• Dramatic gestures, strong angular contours• Powerful color, graphically blunt

Page 7: Depression To Pop
Page 8: Depression To Pop

                                                                                     

New Mexico Recollections, No. 12, 1922-23

Marsden Hartley moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1918. He was interested in Spanish mysticism and the Penitente sect, influences of which are evident in some of his paintings. In the 1920s Hartley announced his conversion to objectivism, stating he could "hardly bear the sound of the words 'expressionism,' 'emotionalism,' 'personality' . . . because they imply the wish to express personal life and I prefer to have no personal life. Personal art is for me a matter of spiritual

indelicacy."

Page 9: Depression To Pop

Abstract Expressionism

After World War II

• Greater communication around the world reveals life in its misery

• Fear that life has no meaning or value

• Art forms engage satire, and become harsh and direct

• Art is free to express itself, usually at the expense of tradition

• Art becomes a big business, and very commercial

• Artist’s personality becomes a dominant issue

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

• Action painting

• Large canvas placed on floor, paint applied in drips and splatters

• Edges of canvas do not contain the action

• Element of accident plays a big role

• Rhythmic application of paint

• No beginning or end to process, constantly evolving

• Spontaneous energetic creation

Page 11: Depression To Pop

DeKooning, Woman I

•Series of paintings of female nudes

•Harsh, biting, sinister, menacing

•Women as horrifying images

•Sweeping broad brushstrokes that look as though the image was attacked

•Smile said to have been inspired by an advertisement for Camel cigarettes

Page 12: Depression To Pop

Pink Yellow

Mark Rothko

1903 - 1970

Page 13: Depression To Pop

"I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and colour. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.“

"The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time. "

In the June 7, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto:

"1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

"2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

"3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.

"4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. "5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted." [Rothko said "this is the essence of academicism".] "There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. "We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we

profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art."

Page 14: Depression To Pop

Rothko, No. 14

•Color field painter

•Not aggressive like Pollock or DeKooning

•Subtle tonal variations transcend the essentially monochromatic format

•Mysterious effect of forms and images

•Not a defined space

•Forms seem to float ambiguously

•Total color experience, meant to engulf viewer

•Large blocks of fuzzy-edged colors set on a neutral background

Page 15: Depression To Pop

Minimalism• Form in its most basic shapes• No emotional quality• Avoids concepts of beauty• Art in its purest form• Art that eliminates the artist’s handJudd, Untitled• Geometric boxes• No symbolism• Relationship of forms to each other and the environment they are placed in• Shiny surfaces• Reflective nature of the work• Boxes are semi-transparent, possible to see through them• Boxes are the same shape and color• Viewers concentrate on solids and voids• To give the work a title would decrease it minimalist impact

Page 16: Depression To Pop

Donald Judd

Page 17: Depression To Pop

MinimalismMaya Lin, Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial,

Washington DC, 1987• Competition to design Vietnam Veteran’s

Memorial, 1421 entries, unanimously chosen winner

• Two symmetrical black triangular walls set at 125° angle

• Symbolism of the black stone• Highly polished stone that reflects the viewer’s

image• Set into the earth as if walking into a grave• Deeply cut into the site, a scar that eventually

heals, as was Vietnam• Edges of triangles point to the Washington

Monument and the Lincoln Memorial• 58,000 names engraved on the wall, at one point

engulfing the viewerHas made a direct connection

with the public, people come to make rubbings of the deceased’s name for themselves

Page 18: Depression To Pop

Pop Art• Term coined by a London art critic in 1955• Draws from everyday culture• Grounded on consumerism, sympathetic to mass media• Glorifies the commonplace• Views the common object in a new light, usually in isolation• Usually glorifies an expendable object

Hamilton, Just What Is It…?• Values of modern culture expressed• Mass media of movie marquee, television, newspaper, comic book cover as a framed

painting• Advertising: Ford lampshade, Hoover vacuum, Tootsie Pop, Armour Ham• Popular views of men and women: weightlifter and a model sporting real headlights• Abstract expressionist painting as a rug• Moon (or earth seen from the moon?) on the ceiling• Is satire implied?

Page 19: Depression To Pop

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?», 1956A small collage which a few years before the emergence of Pop Art foresees many of the coming art movement’s characteristics: the consumer world takes control of the secluded safety of home life—in which new media, tape recorder, and television come to play a central role. This results in Hamilton’s repeated confrontation with the role of media in interiors, and his combining, for example, the painted image of a radio with a functioning, sound-producing technique built directly behind it.

Page 20: Depression To Pop

Pop Art

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych• Commercial artist• Concentration on standard brands, and supermarket products and well-

known celebrities• Contemporary American folk-heroes glorified• Silkscreen process for mechanical repetition• No need for an artist’s signature• Left: color reproduction of mindless repetition, the way Marilyn’s image

was repeated by the media• Suggestive of repetitive frames of a movie• Right: black and white repetition that is blurred, overexposed, and

underexposed• Her reality lost in her repeated image

Page 21: Depression To Pop

1962

Page 22: Depression To Pop

Roy Lichtenstein, Hopeless, 1962

• Flat colors

• Hard, precise drawing; hard edges

• Impersonal representation of comic strip figures

• Violent action and sentimental romances

• Printing dots yield interior colors