Discussion of pre-wwII intellectual context for the AbEx movement and other movements in Europe

1. Context
• Prewar intellectual & art currents
– Duchamp, Benjamin, Greenberg, avante garde &
kitsch
– Surrealism
– automatism, automatic drawing, psychology, the
unconscious
• Effects of WWII
• Movements:
– US: Abstract Expressionism (AbEx)
• aka 'The New York School', 'The Irascibles'
– Europe: Art Informel (Art without Form), Michel Tapie
– Japan: Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Concrete or Embodied
Art Association)

2. Beginnings: 20th
C Art & Ideas
• Marcel Duchamp (doo-shahm) & The
Readymade
• Walter Benjamin (ben ya meeen) &
Mechanical Reproduction
• Clement Greenberg & Kitsch
• Surrealism

4. • Alfred Steiglitz photograph of The Fountain,
1917

6. • Signed “Louise
Norton”

7. • "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own
hands made the fountain or not has
no importance. He chose it. He took
an ordinary article of life, placed it so
that its useful significance
disappeared under a new title and
point of view -- he created a new
thought for the object.“

8. Marcel Duchamp
• Readymades
• “Concept, not
retina”
• “The viewer
completes the
work of art.”

9. The Readymade
• “The choice was based on a
reaction of visual
indifference with at the same
time a total absence of good
or bad taste ... in fact a
complete anaesthesia.”
• (Left: In advance of a broken
arm, 1915)

13. • Rrose Selavy
• “Eros, c’est la
vie”
• “Love, that’s life”

14. • Marcel Duchamp,
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919

19. Things to think about:
• What is kitsch according to Clement
Greenberg, and how do modern
appropriations of Mona Lisa fit into this
idea?
• How do these take-offs on Mona Lisa
illustrate Benjamin’s claims about the
effect of mechanical reproduction on the
work of art?

20. Which of these requires "initiation into
their [artists'] craft" to understand?
Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911
Norman Rockwell, The Love Song, 1926

26. Surrealism
• SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic
automatism, by which it is intended to
express, verbally, in writing, or by other
means, the real process of thought.
Thought's dictation, in the absence of all
control exercised by the reason and
outside all aesthetic or moral
preoccupations.
--Andre Breton

28. Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924

29. Postwar Art
(After WWII, 1945)

30. World War II (WWII)
• worldwide casualties
• the Holocaust
• the atom bomb
• biochemical weapons
• refugees
• rise of totalitarian Communism

32. • Air raid in Broadgate, England during
WWII

33. • Hiroshima after atom bomb

34. After WWII
• “The American Century”
– Postwar economic boom
– Victory and rebuilding Europe & Japan
• New York as new center of art world
– European artists had fled from war & Hitler
– Economic center of the world
– “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art”
– Serge Gilbault’s history of Abstract
Expressionism