Term
| American Pragmatism & Social Relevance: |
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Definition
• American mvmt in philosophy.
• Truth is assessed according to practical value.
• Straightforward
• In literature: think Hemingway.
• Social relevance is social responsibility b/c of Great Depression.
o Industry & farming hit hard
o Dust Bowl and drought brought farming down.
o WW2
• Military Industrial Complex
• Self-Conscious “Who Are We?” thought
o Nationalism
• Capitalists are evil/Bankers are bad
• Rise of Socialism and Leftist Movement
o Back to Agrarian Roots/Heartland
o Industry/New York/Progress & Hope
o “What is American?”
• Values? Appearance? Land? Social justice? Diff from Europe?
• "Pragmatism, as a tendency in philosophy, signifies the insistence on usefulness or practical consequences as a test of truth. In its negative phase, it opposes what it styles the formalism or rationalism of Intellectualistic philosophy. That is, it objects to the view that concepts, judgments, and reasoning processes are representative of reality and the processes of reality. It considers them to be merely symbols, hypotheses and schemata devised by man to facilitate or render possible the use, or experience, of reality. This use, or experience, is the true test of real existence. In its positive phase, therefore, Pragmatism sets up as the standard of truth some non-rational test, such as action, satisfaction of needs, realization in conduct, the possibility of being lived, and judges reality by this norm to the exclusion of all others." |
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Definition
• Real, working, not glamorous
• Slightly idealist, elevates “everyday”
• Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benson, Curry
• Rural, heartland, affirm and reassure puritanical roots, Protestant Values
• Straightforward and clear
• Think: American Gothic…solid, honest and straightforward |
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| American Realism & Social Realism |
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Definition
• Am Real more urban than Am Regionalism
o Artificiality, Isolation, Abandonment, Coldness, No Connection, Harsh Lighting, Barriers, Distant, Alienation
o Crime, Corruption, Film Noir, Mob, Menacing
• Social realism is more outright and deliberate
o Social Injustices and Economic Distress
o “Life is Hard”
• Working Class Hero
o Satire for social change
o Socialist/Leftist bend
o SOCIALIST realism and SOCIAL realism NOT the same thing
• Social realism critiques gov’t and pushes for change.
• Both champion worker however
o Federal Programs |
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Term
| Farm Security Administration (FSA) |
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Definition
• Implemented by TDR during Depression
• Part of “New Deal” 3 “R’s”
o Relief for Farmers
o Reform of Business Practices
o Recover of Economy
• Hired photographers to document poverty
o Media not like today’s
o Get the magnitude of poverty and heart of matter to generate support & change
• Migrant Mother
o Photojournalism
• Objective & Pragmatic
• Universal face of American migrant worker, Iconic imagery, non-specific
• Broad Ideas
• Propagandistic
• Federal Art Project (FAP)
o 1st Government funded art initiative
o Part of New Deal
o 200,000 works of art
• mostly public
• national and collective identity
o employed artists
o decorated non-federal public bldgs.
o Art for the people
o Provide art education
• Community Centers
o Provide Research
• Index of American Design
• Identity of Country
• Unique National Style |
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Term
| Works Progress Administration (WPA) |
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Definition
• The Works Progress Administration (renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; WPA) was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects,[1] including the construction of public buildings and roads. In much smaller but more famous projects the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.[1]
• Almost every community in the United States had a new park, bridge or school constructed by the agency. The WPA's initial appropriation in 1935 was for $4.9 billion (about 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP), and in total it spent $13.4 billion.[2]
• At its peak in 1938, it provided paid jobs for three million unemployed men (and some women), as well as youth in a separate division, the National Youth Administration. Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA provided almost eight million jobs.[3] Full employment, which emerged as a national goal around 1944, was not the WPA goal. It tried to provide one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment.[4]
• The WPA was a national program that operated its own projects in cooperation with state and local governments, which provided 10%-30% of the costs. WPA sometimes took over state and local relief programs that had originated in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) or Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) programs.[5]
• Liquidated on June 30, 1943, as a result of low unemployment due to the worker shortage of World War II, the WPA provided millions of Americans with jobs for 8 years.[6] Most people who needed a job were eligible for at least some of its positions.[7] Hourly wages were typically set to the prevailing wages in each area.[8] But, workers could not be paid for more than 30 hours a week. Before 1940, to meet the objections of the labor unions, the programs provided very little training to teach new skills to workers. |
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Term
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Definition
| • Allover painting refers to a canvas covered in paint from edge to edge and from corner to corner, in which each area of the composition is given equal attention and significance. This is a radically different approach from modes of painting that offer specific focal points, such as the sitter's face in the case of a portrait. With an allover composition, our eyes are invited to wander the canvas from the top to the bottom, following lines, shapes, and colors. |
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| • Technique first used by Surrealist painters and poets to express the creative force of the unconscious in art. In the 1920s the Surrealist poets André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault tried writing in a hypnotic or trancelike state, recording their train of mental associations without censorship or attempts at formal exposition. These poets were influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory and believed that the symbols and images thus produced, though appearing strange or incongruous to the conscious mind, actually constituted a record of a person’s unconscious psychic forces and hence possessed an innate artistic significance. |
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Definition
| • A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts. |
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| • In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form—the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content. In visual art, formalism is a concept that posits that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained within the work of art. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance. Formalism is an approach to understanding art. |
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Definition
• Greenberg viewed abstraction as a characteristic facet of modern painting, for if art was to be authentically modern, each medium had to pursue a process of rationalisation which would progressively disentangle it from other, related mediums. Indeed, it was also increasingly a necessary facet of modern painting, since art was being threatened by the intrusion of clichés, ideology and commerce.
• Figurative art, and the sorts of anecdotal subjects that were common of American painting in the 1930s, were, for Greenberg, typical of the kind of extraneous, 'literary' material which needed to be excluded from painting. The goal was an abstraction which referred back to painting itself, and disavowed any reference to the external world - for Greenberg, this would be epitomised by the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock.
• Greenberg's approach to art criticism was avowedly formalist. He believed that although form was not the total of art, it offered the only firm basis on which to make both judgements of quality and assessments about the relative character of different works of art. He even argued that was so easy to make contradictory assertions about subject matter in art, that it any discussion of subject was without purpose.
• As the 1950s unfolded, Greenberg began to feel that the gestural abstraction which had characterized the innovative work of de Kooning and others in the late 1940s was beginning to degenerate into a school or a manner - what he termed "the Tenth Street touch," after the area in New York where the painters gathered. This led him to place more importance on the work of color field painters, who he argued were pursuing a more radical deconstruction of the traditional easel picture. He first elaborated these ideas in his essay "American-Type Painting," and pushed them further in "After Abstract Expressionism," and in the introduction to an exhibition he curated in 1964, Post-painterly Abstraction.
• Greenberg's writing sought to elucidate the development of modern art, and to demonstrate that a logic governed the progress from one movement to the next. Although his premises were often challenged - and many of his arguments are now discredited - the rigor that he brought to the criticism of art, both in terms of the practical analysis of individual works, and in terms of historical perspective, has had a huge impact both on art history and on art itself. |
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| Refers to the universal struggle, collective, grand overarching themes, not personal |
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| Private struggle of artist, inner personal struggle |
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• Harold Rosenberg's essay "The American Action Painters," first appeared in Art News in 1952, and was republished in his 1959 collection of essays, The Tradition of the New.
• The essay interpreted new American art along broadly existential lines. Painters, Rosenberg wrote, were now treating the canvas as an "arena in which to act..What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."
• "The American Action Painters" did much to establish Rosenberg's reputation as a critic, and ultimately brought him an important following among other critics and artists such as Lawrence Alloway, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Goldwater. However, much of his argument contradicted Greenberg's reading of painting, which saw the formal qualities of the art work as crucial, and also understood American painting as an integral part of an unfolding tradition of modern painting stretching back to Manet. It thus laid the basis for a long-standing and oftentimes bitter rivalry between Greenberg and Rosenberg.
• Rosenberg' emphasis on the creative act - at the expense of the formal aspects of an artwork - meant that abstraction was a less important quality for him than for Greenberg. However, that is not to say that his tastes were broader than his rival's - in fact, though Rosenberg had been careful, in "The American Action Painters," not to single out any painters as examples of his concept of 'action painting', the phrase implicitly championed gestural abstraction of only a few artists (it was less useful in describing color field painters such as Newman, Rothko, and Still.) If Greenberg's opinions led him to value Pollock above all, Rosenberg's lead him to celebrate de Kooning as well as others such as Motherwell and Kline.
• Rosenberg was the dominant critic in the 1950s, the critic who offered the most popular and compelling description of gestural abstraction, and whose writing inspired a new generation of gestural painters such as Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan. However, his primacy was threatened towards the end of the decade by the increasing importance of color field painting, for which Greenberg began to argue strongly. Inevitably, having praised gestural abstraction so much, Rosenberg was not a champion of post-painterly styles, and he argued that it resembled abstract art theory, rather than abstract art in practice. By the 1960s, Rosenberg's position was further threatened by the attacks of younger critics on the artist that was often taken to be the epitome of action painting, Willem de Kooning: many believed his work was conservative in its recourse to figuration and post-Cubist space.
• Although Greenberg's legacy has been immeasurably more fruitful for art history than Rosenberg's, the latter not only left behind one of the most useful and persuasive descriptions of Abstract Expressionism, but also sowed the seeds of new understandings of painting. In arguing that artists such as de Kooning had transformed the canvas into an "arena in which to act," Rosenberg encouraged a rethinking of the act of painting. This would be picked up by Allan Kaprow in 1958 when he suggested that Pollock's might have an important legacy for performance art, and in more recent times the idea has echoed contemporary artists attempts to further expand the medium of painting beyond the boundaries of the traditional canvas. |
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Definition
| Pollock, 1950, Enamel on Canvas |
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| De Kooning, 1952, Oil on Canvas |
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| Rothko, 1956, Oil on Canvas |
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| Morris Louis, 1959, Acrylic on Canvas |
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| Olitski, 1965, Acrylic on Canvas |
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| Frankenthaler, 1952, Oil on Canvas |
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| Kelly, 1959, Oil on Canvas |
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| • Hard-edge painting is a tendency in late 1950s and 1960s art that is closely related to Post-painterly abstraction and color field painting. It describes an abstract style that combines the clear composition of geometric abstraction with the intense color and bold, unitary forms of color field painting. Although it was first identified with Californian artists, today the phrase is used to describe one of the most distinctive tendencies in abstract painting throughout the United States in the 1960s. |
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| Refers to paints itself and references no artist at all. |
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• Avant-garde (French pronunciation: [avɑ̃ɡaʁd]); from French, "advance guard" or "vanguard"[1]) refers to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics.
• Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the Language poets around 1981.[2]
• The term also refers to the promotion of radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel", (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”, 1825) which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now-customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's] avant-garde", insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political, and economic reform.[3] Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with "art for art's sake", focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic experience, rather than with wider social reform. |
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• Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era.[1] The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.[2] Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called Contemporary art or Postmodern art.
• Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henri Matisse's two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.[3] It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.
• Initially influenced by Toulouse Lautrec, Gauguin and other late 19th century innovators Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and several other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter. |
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• Greenberg talks about the significance of self-criticism of modernism, which is began with philosopher Kant, who suggested “ to criticize the means itself of criticism”. The essence of modernism is to keep asking questions about the foundation itself, trying to find out the limitations.
• Like religion, art seems to be unable to criticize itself, however, Greenberg points out that, what modernists are able to do is to look for the exclusive features of the medium of art (e.g. the 2D surfaced canvas of paintings) and to make it explicit. This movement is self-critical.
• Throughout the essay, Greenberg explains how modernist painters desperate to differ their works from the old masters’. They tried to change the practice of creating 3D space inside a drawing, which old masters tried to imitate sculptural illusion in a drawing. Instead, they gave up perspective, maintain the optical experience on a 2D surface, but at the same time made the objects in the paintings realizable. The process of going back from the complicated form to pure form is self-critical and complicated.
• Lastly, after talking about the self-criticism of art, Greenberg points out the importance of self-criticism of the artists themselves. To Greenberg, self-criticism is not a theory that can be studied, and hence not many artists can achieve it. He suggests that, although artists maybe achieving the same “form” in art, everyone should have different perspective and uniqueness. To be self-critical is to deliberately create limitations for oneself , and emphasis individuality. |
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| Items on composition all relate, focal points, traditional |
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• Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto.
• Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. The 31 artists in the exhibition included Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Friedel Dzubas, Paul Feeley, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Nicholas Krushenick, Alexander Liberman, Morris Louis, Arthur Fortescue McKay, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Ray Parker, David Simpson, Albert Stadler, Frank Stella, Mason Wells, Emerson Woelffer, and a number of other American and Canadian artists who were becoming well known in the 1960s.[1]
• Among the prior generation of contemporary artists, Barnett Newman has been singled out as one who anticipated "some of the characteristics of post-painterly abstraction."[2]
• As painting continued to move in different directions, initially away from abstract expressionism, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term "post-painterly abstraction", which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by minimalism, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting.[ |
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| • Assemblage is an artistic process. In the visual arts, it consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects. |
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• John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde.
• Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.[
• The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance |
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| • A combine painting is an artwork that incorporates various objects into a painted canvas surface, creating a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture |
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| Ruaschenberg, 1955, Combine |
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