2. Fallingwater
• 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright
• Horizontal massing (prairie school)
• Cantilever
• Cast concrete
• Ribbon fenestration
• Site specific
• Organicism
• Hearth
• Influences: Japanese, Arts and
Crafts, modern technology
• Commissioned by Edgar Kaufmann,
a department store owner, to replace
a summer cottage
• Declares war on the modern
industrial city
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3. Bauhaus Building
• 1925-26, Walter Gropius, Dessau,
Germany
• “workhouse” = modern engineering,
curtain walls (no load bearing
features)
• Functionality, craftsmanship
• Counterpart to the total and rational
planning envisioned by the de Stijl
group
• He admired the spirit of medieval
building guilds
• Sought to revive and commit that
spirit to the reconciliation of modern
art and industry
• Frankly acknowledges the reinforced
concrete, steel, and glass of which it
is built
• Used asymmetrical balancing to
convey dynamic quality of life
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4. German Pavilion
• 1929, Mies Van der Rohe
• International Exposition, Spain
• He was director of the Bauhaus
• “Less is more.”
• Great passion = subtle perfection of
structure, proportion, and detail
• Relied on domino construction
system developed by Le Corbusier
• Very simple
• No references to the past
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5. Villa Savoye
• 1930, Le Corbusier, France
• Big in purism, emphasizing purity of geometric form
• Hated the crowded, noisy, chaotic cities
• Envisioned a city of uniform style, laid out on a grid
• Building strictly functional
• Nature wouldn’t be neglected
• Icon of international style
• Culminated the domino construction system
• Curtain walls on the exterior to provide freedom of design
• Ribbon windows
• Designed as a weekend retreat
• “machine for living”
• Brutalism: raw process by which it was made is shown
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6. Schroeder House
• 1925, Gerrit Rietveld, Utrecht, The
Netherlands
• Two kinds of beauty: a sensual or
subjective one and a higher rational,
objective kind
• Example of International style
• Applied Mondrian’s principle of a
dynamic equilibrium
• Radically asymmetrical exterior
composed of interlocking gray an
white planes
• Commissioned by wealthy widow
• House = ascetic experience
• Walls slide
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7. Man, Controller of the Universe
• 1934, Diego Rivera
• Commissioned by Rockefeller Family
• In the lobby of the RCA Building
• He was a communist and included Lenin’s face
• The Rockefellers canceled his commission and had the mural destroyed
• Recreated in Mexico city
• Man controls the universe through manipulation of technology
• Lenin on the right, capitalists on the left
• Capitalist world cursed by militarism and labor unrest
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8. Guernica
• 1937, Picasso, Paris Universal Exposition
• = synthetic cubism
• Surrealism: horror
• Victims of war throughout time
• Timeless look at war
• Made during the Spanish Civil War
• Painted in Paris
• = a stark, hallucinatory nightmare that became a powerful symbol of the brutality of war
• Focused on the victims
• Screaming horse = Spanish Republic
• Bull = Franco or Spain
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9. Vanna Venturi House
• 1961-64, Robert Venturi, Chestnut
Hill, PA
• Designed for his mother
• Plays with complexity and confusion
• Refers to past: Wright and classical
• Beginnings in Mannerism
• Ambiguity, paradox
• Rejected the abstract purity of
International Style
• Incorporated elements drawn fro
vernacular sources
• “Less is a bore.”
• Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture
• Building = simple and complex
• Circles, triangles, rectangles
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10. Guggenheim Museum
• 1993-97, Frank Gehry, Bilbao, Spain
• Used vernacular forms and cheap
materials
• Developed a organic, sculptural style
• Resembles a living organism
• Pays homage to Wright’s famous
one in New York and attempts to
outdo it in size and effect
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11. Portrait of a German Officer
• 1914, Marsden Hartley
• Exhibited at the Armory Show
• Pioneer of American modernism
• Merged cubism from Paris with
expressionism of Kandinsky in Berlin
• Tightly arranged composition of
boldly colored shapes and patterns,
interspersed with numbers, letters,
military imagery
• Speaks symbolically of Karl von
Freyburg
• Black creates a funeral undertone
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12. Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA
• 1936, Dorothea Lange
• She was a leading RA/FSA
photographer
• Pictures Florence Thompson
• Captures fears of an entire
population of disenfranchised people
• Image of a generation
• Using photography as a moral,
reform sense to raise awareness
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13. Aspects of Negro Life
• 1934, Aaron Douglas
• Developed an abstracted style influenced by African art as well as Art Deco
• Used schematic figures, silhouetted in profile with eyes rendered frontally like Egyptian art
• Limited palette
• Concentric bands suggesting musical rhythms or spiritual emanations
• Painted for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public library under the sponsorship of
the Public Works of Art Project
• Intended to awaken in African Americans, a sense of their place in history
• At the right, blacks celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation
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14. Migration of the Negro
• 1940-41, Jacob Lawrence
• Influenced by Locke and Douglass
• Devoted early work to depiction of
black history
• Recounted through narrative painting
in dozens of small panels, each with
a text
• Made of 60 panels
• Chronicled the great 20th century
exodus of blacks from the rural south
the urban North
• Boldly abstracted style suggests
influence of both cubism and black
folk art
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15. Autumn Rhythm
• 1950, Jackson Pollock
• Interested in vast American west and
Indian art
• Taught by Benton
• American search for self
• Pulsing foreground, middle ground,
and background
• Giving vent to primal, natural forces
• Took pleasure in the sense of being
fully absorbed in action, eliminating
the sense of self-consciousness
• Shows harmony with oneself and the
world
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16. Mountains and Sea
• 1952, Helen Frankenthaler
• Among the second generation of
Abstract Expressionism
• Used thin oil paints and applied them
in washes
• Pollock saw her work as avant-garde
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17. Canyon
• 1959, Robert Rauschenberg
• Combine painting
• Featured in the “Art of Assemblage”
exhibition
• Desired to work in the gap between
art and life
• Chaotically mixes conventional
artistic materials with a wide variety
of ingredients from the urban
environment
• Challenges viewer to make sense of
it
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18. Just What Is It That Makes Today So
Different, So Appealing?
• 1955, Hamilton, collage
• Prominent member of the
Independent Group
• He resisted the Institute of
Contemporary Art’s commitment to
modernist art, design, and architect
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19. Marilyn Diptych
• 1962, Andy Warhol
• Was a successful commercial
illustrator
• Turned from conventional painting to
the assembly-line technique of silk-
screening photo-images
• Borrowed the diptych format from the
icons of Christian saints
• Symbolically treated her as a saint
• He was fascinated with fame
• Fame confers, as holiness, a kind of
immortality
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20. Lipstick on Caterpillar Tracks
• 1969, Claes Oldenburg
• Proposed city monuments
• Criticizes war
• Cynical attack on Vietnam
• Created at the invitation of a group of
graduate students in Yale’s school of
Architecture
• Requested a monument to the
“Second American Revolution” of the
late 60’s (student demonstrations
against Vietnam)
• Erotic overtones “make love, not war”
• Addressed issue of “potency” both
sexual and military
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