1.
1900-MID 20TH CENTURY ART:
Art center moves from Paris to New York
Social Commentary and Abstraction

2.
The Steerage-
Alfred Stieglitz
1907
Social Commentary

3.
The Armory Show
1913- International exhibition
of Modern Art in NYC-
• Matisse
• Picasso
• Braque
• Duchamp
• Kandinsky
• Kirchner
• Brancusi
The New York Herald:
“The United States is invaded
by Aliens…Modernism is of
precisely the same
heterogeneous alien origin…”
Fountain- original 1917
The “Ready Made”

4.
Marcel Duchamp
Fountain- original
1917
The “Ready Made”
DADA

5.
Duchamp- Nude Descending a Staircase
1912- Cubism and Futurism
Influenced by Jules Etienne Marey 1886
Artsy- Armory show

6.
African Art and Cubism

7.
Les Demoiselles
D’Avignon 1907

8.
Guernica

9.
Braque
The Portuguese, 1911
Analytic Cubism
When Braque saw Les Demoiselles for
the first time, he went into a state of
shock. However, many months after
this initial encounter, Braque
reconsidered his initial reaction and
responded with Large Nude (1908), in
which he follows Picasso's lead and
combines several points of view in one
image. Braque subordinates color in
order to attain a geometric structure of
overlapping, shifting, tilted cubes that
seem to project out of and into the
picture plane.

10.
HENRI MATISSE
Fauvism
LES FAUVES 1905-1908

11.
Goldfish, Matisse 1912

12.
ABSTRACTION-simplification; reduction to the essential
PURE FORM:FORMAL ELEMENTS OF ART

13.
Wassily Kandinsky

14.
Wassily Kandinsky
Improvisation #28 1912

15.
RUSSIA: Malevich
SUPREMATISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM
Suprematist Composition
Airplane Flying
1915
“supreme reality is PURE FEELING
which attaches to no object”

16.
Pure language of shape and color
Dynamic relationships
All people can have an intuitive response
1917- Russian revolution wipes out the
past. Malevich and “Suprematist” and
“Constructivist” artists felt art should not
be practical or tied to objective world-
art should be feeling based.

17.
Piet Mondrian
Composition in
Red, Blue and Yellow
1930
Holland 1917: co-founded
“De Stijl”-
The Style: pure plastic art
Limited formal vocabulary

18.
Mondrian distilled his representations of the
world to their basic vertical and horizontal
elements, which represented the two essential
opposing forces: the positive and the negative,
the dynamic and the static. The compositions
reflect what he saw as the universal balance of
these forces.

19.
DE STIJL (The Style): INFLUENCED BY MONDRIAN’S WORK
A utopian group focused mainly on architecture and design
- Influenced by ideas & work coming out of the:
Bauhaus (school in Germany, headed by the architect Walter Gropius)
- Believed post-WWI a new age that would involve a higher state of consciousness & values
- Machine age would ease man’s personal living needs, create a harmonious environment
- “There is an old and a new consciousness…The old one is directed toward the individual.
The new one is directed toward the universal.”
- Wanted beauty, harmony, spirituality & community in every creative undertaking
- Goal: total integration of art & life

20.
Josef Albers- Germany
• Part of the Bauhaus- (closed under
Nazis in 1933)
• A bridge between European &
American Art.
• Architect Philip Johnson brought
him to Black Mountain College in
NC, Albers brought Willem de
Kooning there; Albers later went to
Yale.
• Published books on color theory.
Elaine de Kooning wrote that however
impersonal his paintings might at first
appear, not one of them “could have
been painted by any one but Josef
Albers himself.”

21.
SCULPTURE: abstraction
Constantin Brancusi
Bird in Space 1928

22.
Dedication to "truth to materials”- idea was to change art from being a window through
which one saw a world created by the artist or an illusion, but instead a concern for the
materials that one was working with, so that paint was clearly paint and stone was
obviously stone.
The modern trend is thought to be inspired in part by the work of Michelangelo who
carefully quarried and selected his marble with specific figures in mind. His work made the
viewer aware of the beauty of the stone as well as the figures themselves.

23.
Truth to Materials:
Marble, stone, bronze,
Wood, metal…polished for days
“I pursue the inner, hidden reality, the very
essence of objects in their own intrinsic
fundamental nature; this is my only deep
preoccupation.”
THE KISS
1908

24.
Kirchner,
Dresden 1908
German
Expressionism

25.
Self-Portrait as a Soldier
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1915

26.
German Expressionism and Kathe Kollwitz
Considered one of Germany’s most
important early 20th-century artists,
Käthe Kollwitz captured the
hardships suffered by the working
class.
Themes of war and poverty
dominate Kollwitz’s oeuvre, with
images of women grieving dead
children a particularly important
and recurring theme—an
experience that Kollwitz suffered
herself when her son died in WWI,
influencing her decision to become
a Socialist.
Kollwitz’s exploration of human
suffering amounted to a searing
indictment of social conditions in
Germany. In 1936, the Nazis
declared Kollwitz’s art “degenerate”
and her artworks were removed
from museums.

27.
Memorial Sheet
for Karl Liebknecht
Kollwitz created this image as a response to
the brutal murder of Karl Liebknecht, a
Communist leader who helped lead an
armed revolt against the Socialist
Democratic Party after Germany declared
war in 1914
Since 1919, an annual Liebknecht-Luxemburg
Demonstration has been held in Berlin, the
world's largest funerary parade, and the
biggest meeting of the German left. 14,000
people attended the rally in Karl Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg's honor in 2016.

28.
REALISM AND SOCIAL COMMENTARY :
United States
(mainly 30’s & 40’s)
- Responses rural and urban settings,
affected by the depression, WWII and
change of family structure that happens for
blacks and whites alike in the migration to
the city.
- African-Americans migrated north seeking
work in Northern cities, seeking more racial
tolerance and job opportunities
- Artists comment on the social events and
social nature of the world around them; on
the psychological tone of the time.
- They hope to bring awareness and change
conditions
Dorothea Lange- Works Project
Administration(WPA) and US Farms
Security Administration (FSA)
documentary photographer.

29.
Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother
1935

30.
War and Japanese Internment

31.
Jacob Lawrence 1940
#49 from The Migration of the Negro

32.
Romare Bearden
Part of the “Harlem Renaissance”,
along with writers like Langston Hughes

33.
Detroit Auto Industry Mural: Diego Rivera

34.
Diego Rivera Ancient Mexico 1929-35

35.
Diego Rivera,
Dream of a Sunday
Afternoon in
Alameda Central
Park

36.
99

37.
Frida Kahlo
The Two Fridas 1939

38.
Existentialist philosophy-
Differences with Rodin?
Man is solitary, alienated from others

39.
“The Surrealist Table”
Giacometti Invited Meret
Oppenheim into
a major surrealist exhibition
She made a sculpture called
Giacometti’s ear.

40.
Meret Oppenheim
Le Dejeuner en Fourrure 1936,
MOMA, NYC
Surrealist
Inspired by a comment from
Picasso that everything looks
better in fur- erotic connotations
Photographs by
Man Ray

41.
http://mondo-
blogo.blogspot.com/2011/05/meret-
oppenheim-is-weirder-than-you-
are.html
Meret in a paper jacket she made
Surrealism

42.
THE NEW YORK SCHOOL:
(Later 1940’s – 1950’s)
- Abstract Expressionism the first major American avant-garde movement
-by 1940 many European artists established in New York, due to war in Europe
-Younger artists interested in examining and revealing the unconscious through use
of automatism and chance
- Interested in objectifying the canvas and using a wide range of materials
- Younger artists also interested in expressing and evoking emotion
Abstract Expressionism develops along two lines:
- Gestural Abstraction and
- Chromatic Abstraction / Color Field Painting

43.
- Artists drawn to Carl Jung’s ideas concerning the Collective Unconscious
The Collective Unconscious: beneath one’s private memories and private
unconscious is a storehouse of feelings and symbolic associations shared by all
humans; the universal aspect of the human psyche
- it contains instinctive patterns, thoughts and behaviors that human beings
identify as emotions and values.
- Collective Unconscious can only be examined and understood through its
projected images and symbols (daydreams, fantasies, myths, spiritual trances
and art)
Jung’s ideas provide artists with a deeper, more spiritual basis for their work

44.
Goals of Abstract Expressionism: expression of artist’s spontaneous emotions
- to delve into the unconscious
- to explore the inherent qualities of the paint medium
- To use the expressive quality of the medium to express emotions and ideas
- to explore the surface of the canvas
- to embrace the flatness of the picture plane
- to explore the act of creating (the intuitive action, energy, vitality of moving
paint on canvas)
Subject Matter
- Generally non-objective, completely abstract works- some figures
Stylistic Attributes:
- no central focus
- spontaneous, energetic application of pigment
- drips and huge slashing brush strokes, traces of the action and the process
- almost as though trying to get inside canvas itself
- “Action Painting” coined in 1952 by Harold Rosenberg

45.
Jackson Pollock Lavender Mist 1950

46.
A UNIQUE TECHNIQUE AND STYLE:
The finding of fractal dimensions in drip
paintings of Jackson Pollock, an enigmatic
American abstract expressionist, has
sparked a sensation among scholars in
different disciplines. It was even marveled
that “Pollock was honing his ability to
generate fractals a full quarter century
before fractal geometry was formally
described”

47.
• On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I
can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to
the method of the Indian sand painters of the West.
• My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest
throughout.
• Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
• We have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and
photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world
– in other words – expressing energy, motion and the other inner forces.

48.
Willem De Kooning
Woman 1
1950-52
Worked on this for 2 years
Different than Pollock,
because?

49.
COLOR FIELD ABSTRACTION / CHROMATIC ABSTRACTIONISM
(Late 40’s – 1960’s)
Artists whose interest focus on the emotional, expressive, and aesthetic possibilities of color
- Canvases are still large and abstract with areas of gesture (zips, blurred strokes)
- But overall, they are much quieter, with a de-acceleration of motion, lines, texture
- Shapes become fields of intense homogenous color, intended to express ideas and emotions
- Color used to create huge expansive spaces intended to evoke a sense of deep infinity, spirituality, tranquility -
Large canvases intended to subdue the spectator’s ego and to create a sense of AWE (the sublime)
- Jungian psychology and Buddhism contribute to artist’s idea of a transcendent world

50.
Mark Rothko
#14
1960
#11
Sold recently for
46 million dollars

51.
The Bay, Hellen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler
The Bay
1963

52.
POP ART
“Pop” short for popular culture
- Pop begins in mid 1950’s in both Britain and U.S…in full
force by mid-60’s
- a reaction to the abstraction and its serious and formal
issues
- a style which reintroduces recognizable subject matter
- it specifically embraces imagery from popular culture
-younger generation sees Abstract Expressionists as self-
absorbed and self-important
-abstraction also causes alienation amongst viewers
- young artists want to engage in art that reflects their
new modern, hip youth culture and its mindset
- rise of materialism and popular culture manifested
through
* commercial visuals, advertisements,
* shapes and symbols and colors brought about by
mass production

53.
Jasper Johns Flag, 1954 Encaustic (pigment dissolved in wax, oil and collage on fabric)
Things “seen” but not looked at.

54.
Andy Warhol

55.
Use of pattern and repetition emphasizes
the qualities of consumerism- he called
his studio “The Factory”. Used Silkscreen.

56.
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych 1962- attention to celebrity culture, used appropriated images

57.
Claes Oldenberg 1962, painted plaster and stuffed vinyl

58.
Lipstick on Caterpillar Tracks

59.
Earth Art:
Andy Goldsworthy
Robert Smithson- Spiral Jetty, Utah
Christo and Jeanne-Claude:
Surrounded Islands, FL

60.
Robert Smithson- Spiral Jetty, Utah