American Art
American Realists

Edward Hopper: 1882-1967

• Communicates the loneliness and alienation of modern life; both in the city, and in the country.
• Simplifies subjects in order to create a harmonious composition.

(slide) Art School 1903-1906
(slide) Paris 1906
(slide) N.Y. 1910-1920
(slide) Gloucester: Summer 1923
(slide) 1924
(slide) House by the Railroad
(slide) N.Y. 1925-26
(slide) Maine: 1927
(slide) N.Y. 1928
(slide) Night Windows
(slide) Hotel Room
(Slide) Early Sunday Morning: 1930
(slide) House in Truro, Mass. 1934
(slide) Cape Cod Afternoon: 1936
(slide) New York Movie: 1939
(slide) Gas Station
(slide) The Office at Night
(slide) Nighthawks: 1942
(slide) Cape Cod Morning: 1950
(slide) Morning Sun
(slide) Vermeer and Hotel Window
(slide) Second Story Sunlight 1960
(slide) New York Office 1962
(slide) Self Portrait and grave stone

Grant Wood: 1892-1942

• Paints scenes of the mid-west
• Tries to communicate a strong sense of place and character
• Sets paintings in the mid-west

Dorothea Lange: 1895-1965

• First female documentary photographer
• Wanted to expose the world to the plight of workers during the depression
• Sought funding to help the poor and displaced

(slides) Photos of America's refugee camps; the depressed
(slides) Photos of women and families.

Georgia O'Keefe: 1887-1986

• Made paintings that often blurred the boundaries between realism and abstraction.
• Communicated her emotions, interests, and aesthetics.
• Work has a lyrical quality
• One of first artists to make large paintings about flowers

(slide) Photo of O'Keefe and Husband
(slide) Photo of O'Keefe's hands
(slide) Sky scraper painting
(slides) Paints of flowers
(slides) Paintings of western themes (skulls, architecture, landscapes)
(slide) Ribbon Road/Western Landscape

Abstract Expressionism
Or: Why is this so famous? My little brother could do that!

Abstract Expressionism

• First wholly original American Art Movement.
• Combines the surrealist idea of automatic writing, the expressionist idea of emotional release, and the cubist notion of equality of surface.
• Paint, color and brushstrokes are the subject matter.
• The painting exists as a pure aesthetic memory of a moment of artistic freedom.

Influences in Review

• Existentialism
• Social relevance
• Surrealist interest in the unconscious mind
• American matter-of-factness
• Mexican influence: grand scale
• Formal European Modernism: Cubism, Expressionism and Abstraction
• A sense of Americas growing importance
• Psychological mysticism
• Abstract Expressionist painters were attempting to look inside themselves. They wanted to unlock their unconscious and discover fundamental truths about themselves, spirituality, the nature of creativity, and in some cases the nature of God.
• If you were given the assignment to create an artwork that expressed the creativity of an infinite God, what would it look like? If you came to the conclusion that recognizable subject matter was too limiting for the concept, what would you do next?

(slide) Berlin 1938--Hitler organized the degenerate art show, including anything impressionist or modern. Then a realistic show of officially sanctioned art.
(slide) Van Gogh for sale at auction. (slides) WWII pictures. What does one do with the knowledge of how man can be so inhumane and life can be so tenuous?

Jackson Pollock: 1912-1956

• This was the question that Pollock faced himself with, How do I create paintings that are pure aesthetic experiences, without the mental clutter of subject matter?
• His paintings are a record of a dance around the canvass.
• They are about the activity of painting

(slide) 1930s Pollack worked with Thomas Hart Benton and the WPA
(slides) Spatter Paintings--Action paintings, paintings about the act of painting.

Willem de Kooning: 1904-1997

• Classically trained as an artist in Holland
• Escaped to the US as a stowaway during WW 2
• Paintings meant to convey an emotional moment in time
• Paintings are primarily about the act of painting, and the paint itself
• De Koonings works were painted, drawn, then scraped off and repainted. Some areas have nearly half an inch of paint on the canvas, while in other places the canvas still shows through.
• He seemed to pick an almost arbitrary moment in this process of becoming to quit, and so the paintings always appear to be en route to a new destination.
• It is the spontaneity, and the direct cues to his painting process that are important.

(slides) various slides of de Kooning's paintings

Franz Kline 1910-1962

• The final test of a painting is; does the painters emotion come across.
• Painted large scale gestures
• Paintings have a feeling of architecture
• Record of a moment
• About the paint
• In 1948 Kline enlarged some of his quick brush sketches in an opaque projector and a four by five inch brush drawing of the rocking chair loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any reality but that of their own existence. From that day, Franz Klines style of painting changed completely. Elaine DeKooning

(slide) The Cedar St. Bar: Greenwich Village
(slides) Various slides of his Black and white paintings

Mark Rothko: 1903-1970

• Color Field Painter
• Wanted to capture the shimmering spiritual qualities of color
• Paintings are about surface, paint, and composition
• It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints, as long as it is well painted. 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 a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art." Mark Rothko
• I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture. This may well give the key to the observer of the ideal relationship between himself and the rest of the pictures. Mark Rothko

(slides) Various works with very thinned colors.

Summary--There is truth to be had by looking internally. Standing in front of a canvas and letting it happen could tell you about yourself. This form of art was a reaction to Hitler's realistic painting.

We Got the Beat
The 1950s in America
America in the 1950s

(slides) Various slides of 1950's American cultural artifacts
(slides) American politics

• Thurmond supported racial segregation with the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single Senator on the Senate floor, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful attempt to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
• The 1950s saw the birth of counterculture. Artists, writers and musicians sought to change institutionalized racism and bigotry. These creative individuals thought that society had been lulled to sleep by the propaganda of universal prosperity. They believed Americans had been taught to ignore the social, racial, political, sexual and economic groups that didn't fit the official picture.
• Painters/Writers tried to capture this milieu

Allen Ginsberg

• What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Howl Part II

Jack Kerouac

• On the Road
• I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down. Jack Kerouac

William Burroughs

• Naked Lunch
• America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
• His words, his face, and his voice were finding their way into albums and music videos. He collaborated with a diversity of edgy groups including Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Laurie Anderson, and the Disposable Heroes.
• In 1992 Kurt Cobain released an album with Burroughs, 'The Priest They Called Him' in which Cobian plays electric guitar over Burrough's spoken voice.

Pop Art
We've had enough abstraction!
Pop Art

• The optimism that had given rise to abstract expressionism immediately after WW2, gave way to pessimism and anger during the 1960s.
• Artists needed to have subject matter reappear in art, so that they could address the issues of the day.
• Pop artists challenge accepted notions of what art is in a similar way to the Da Da artists of the post WWI era.
• We are the product of our culture; we aren't internal, we're external.

Robert Rauschenberg: 1925

• Uses the junk from society to create art
• Makes fun of previous art movements and of society
• Challenges ideas of what art is
• Rauschenberg rejected the existential idea that a person could find a true self by looking internally. He disagreed with the abstract expressionist notion that the subconscious could provide clues into the true nature of mankind. Rauschenberg believed instead that human personalities are born from a collaboration with their environment. We become what we see, hear, and eat.

(slide) Erased De Kooning
(slides) Various different "combine" paintings. We are bombarded by images; what do these images mean?

Jasper Johns: 1930

• Subject matter was so ordinary, it disappeared, leaving an almost abstract painting
• Questions how symbols, language and painting work
• Highly ironic
• Focuses on difficulty
• Almost all of Johns' images incorporate art history, art-making, found images, and references to his earlier works and experiences. Scholars have probed these sources, speculating on their many possible meanings

(slides) Paintings of the American flag
(slides) Paintings involving numbers
(slides) Paintings of other common objects like targets or body parts
(slide) Bronze of Beer cans and paint brushes
(slide) A Simpson's Allusion to the pianter
(slide) Catalogue paintings
(slide) Later paintings allude to historical paintings

Louise Nevelson: 1900-1988

• When you put together things that other people have thrown out, youre really bringing them to life a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created." Louise Nevelson

(slides) Three dimensional junk sculptures

The Landscape of Signs
American Pop Art 1960 - 1965

Andy Warhol: 1928-1987

• Work focuses on excess, reproduction, and sameness
• Looks at the mechanics of fame
• in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes
• I love Hollywood, Theyre beautiful. Everybodys plastic I want to be plastic. Andy Warhol
• The reason I am painting this way is because I want to be a machine. Whatever I do, and do machine-like is because it is what I want to do. I think it would be terrific if everybody was alike. Andy Warhol

(slides) Various images from repetitive images from American culture
(slide) Soup Cans
(slides) Silk screen images
(slides) Images of Marilyn Monroe
(slides) Images of Car Crashes
(slide) Images of Andy Worhol with Famous people
(slides) Celebrity portraits in silk screen
(slide) Cow wall paper
(slides) Velvet Underground musical group that worked with multi media

Roy Lichtenstein 1923-1997

• Reaction against abstract expressionism
• High sense of irony toward both art and society
• Questions the notion of an artist as an existential figure creating heroic gestures
• Makes fun of the art world, and consumer society
• Photo from the Life magazine article,Is this the Worst Artist in America?

James Rosenquist: 1933

• Uses images from advertising and the news to create commentaries on popular culture, war, the government and capitalism
• Trained as a billboard painter
• We are attacked by radio and television and visual communications at such a speed and with such a force that painting now seems very old fashioned. Why shouldnt it be done with that power and gusto of advertising, with that impact? James Rosenquist

Jim Dine: 1935

• Presents ordinary objects and found objects in new ways
• Encourages you to see the things you take for granted in new ways
• Changes the banal into the heroic

Other British Art School Blokes

Peter Blake: 1932