| Paris and New York in the Early 20th Century. During the early 1900s, the lifestyles of Americans and Europeans changed dramatically in response to a host of revolutionary inventions and initiatives. Writers, musicians, and artists were not immune from this influence, as evidenced by the exciting innovations of style, technique, and subject matter that emerged under the "Modernist" label. In fact, authors and artists may have been instrumental in shaping public opinion and in facilitating the transformation of American and European culture into the modern age. In this program, Professor Wanda Corn provides a theoretical framework for exploring the new art forms of the modernist, avant-garde period. Professor Corn believes that specific pieces of art are less examples of individual genius, than manifestations of the culture of the time. Through cartoons, photographs, and paintings of the period, Professor Corn compels the viewer to consider the uniqueness of this period, which was characterized by unprecedented slogan commercialism, a conscious rejection of Victorian values of the 19th century, and the emergence of a new liberated national identity. Professor Corn asks viewers to examine the art and artists of New York and Paris during the period from 1910 to 1930 in this modern context of rapid technological advancement, cultural ebullience, "transatlantic exchange," and gilded individual and national outlook. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Paris and New York c. December 1910 By the first decade of the 20th century, both New York City and Paris had undergone significant infrastructural changes that catapulted them into the modern age. Between 1850 and 1910, Paris was transformed into a sprawling city of "grand boulevards" and imposing monuments, a palatial cultural and governmental center. During that same period, New York replaced ferry routes with "daring bridges" and row houses with "skyscraper canyons," emerging as a world financial center and a symbol of new urban modernity. In this program, Professor Wanda Corn continues to develop a framework for understanding the divergent artistic initiatives that surfaced in Paris and New York during the early 1900s. She explores the geographical differences between these two cities and the effects that rapid growth had on the attitudes and outlooks of their respective populations. She uses paintings by French Impressionists Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, and by American Ashcan artists George Bellows and John Sloan to show how modern urbanism had very different meanings for Parisians, who were concerned about "the anonymity of an unfamiliar, opened-up airy city with its new forms of spectatorship," and New Yorkers, who found themselves immersed in the experiences of city life, "the crush of bodies, physical contact, and sensory overload of an urban mass." 08DR/CL SCA 52 min. |
| When the term avant-garde first surfaced in a cultural context in the late 1800s, it was applied to a group of French writers who radically opposed the status quo. Since then the term has acquired a prescient dimension, suggesting writers or artists who were creatively, technically, and inspirationally ahead of their time. Futurists, Cubists, and Dadaists were some of the labels applied to avant-garde art circles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Paris and New York. In this program, Art Professor Wanda Corn focuses on the sociology of the avant-garde. She explains how the emergence of an avant-garde subculture was a typically modern phenomenon, an antithetical reaction to the staid "Schools of Art" that discouraged artists from experimenting with new techniques and art forms. Through a careful selection of charts, drawings, photographs, and paintings, Professor Corn shows how a network of avant-garde groups sought to establish and sustain themselves through ephemeral publications, weekly "salon" meetings, controversial manifestos, and small dealer exhibitions. The avant-garde had in common their desire to oppose anything conventional and to "reform traditional, hierarchical, and autocratic institutions." In France their opponent was the middle class bourgeoisie; in America it was any form of Puritanism, materialism, and commercialism. The avant-garde were the self-appointed vanguards of modernity, and their art was often a reflection of that rebellious attitude. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| The avant-garde artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Paris and New York enthusiastically endorsed a fusion of Symbolism and Abstraction. Unlike the traditionalists for whom subject matter mattered and realism ruled, Modernist artists focused on the process of art and on the potential experiences evoked by art. In this program, Professor Wanda Corn utilizes works by Matisse, Whistler, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Kandinsky to demonstrate the special connotations of Symbolism and Abstraction for the avant-garde artists. For them, Abstraction meant rendering familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, without didactic purpose or rigid allegiance to the true appearance of the objects, and with the goal of evoking a spiritual, sensual, and emotional response from the viewer. The artists of the avant-garde believed that art could "exploit its own nature, could be powerful through its own tools," as evidenced by the bold, ethereal forms and flat serpentine lines of Matisse's The Dance and the unnatural celestial "firestorm of light and movement" in Van Gogh's The Starry Night. In the same fashion, Symbolism for the Modernist artist did not mean peaceful doves or pure white lilies; rather it meant "manipulating the language of art" - lines, form, and color - to convey something beyond the images depicted. The artists of the avant-garde sought to stimulate a "psychic experience" for their audiences and to have art appreciated for its own sake. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
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"Alfred Stieglitz would do more than anyone in America to
persuade the art world that photography deserved a place alongside painting
and sculpture." -Smithsonian Magazine The Stieglitz Circle - Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Edward Steichen - was at the cutting edge of art in the early years of the twentieth century. From Stieglitz's Photo Succession Gallery, later called 291, avant-garde artists showed their works in the most modern setting of the time: the works were hung at eye level in small rooms with controlled light and soft colors. It was the perfect vehicle in which to promote photography as a new art form, and it was the only gallery in New York devoted to the truly avant garde until 1913 and the Armory Show. Through Steichen's network of friends in Europe, such artists as Rodin, Picasso, Braque, Rousseau, Cezanne, Brancusi, and Matisse displayed works at the 291 Gallery. Stieglitz himself, with his long, unruly hair and moustache and characteristic eyeglasses, came to represent both artist and entrepreneur, and he began to collect and show American avant garde works in 1908. This second Stieglitz Circle focused on American artists, with their growing sense of national pride and self-assuredness and their emphasis on abstracting nature. John Marin was one of these artists. Using watercolors, his early works are very impressionistic and based in nature, but his control of the canvas and his spontaneous brushstrokes filled his works with enthusiasm and energy. In the 1920s he expanded his palette to oils, and these rural and urban landscapes are small-scaled and intimate, yet exciting. Marin's primary works influenced such Abstract Expressionists as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. Associated Program: and Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz |
| Alfred Stieglitz's Second Circle, composed of American artists, displayed a kind of abstraction that was based on organic forms and influenced by the heritage of the Hudson River School, the sublimity of nature, and transcendentalist philosophy. Their works defined a group aesthetic that was purely American. Artist Arthur Dove, like John Marin, conveyed his personal experiences through abstraction and used the traditional medium of watercolor in his early years. Dove started with a small pivotal experience and moved beyond it to the abstract in a controlled way through his forms and his distinctive earthy palette. His landscapes hint at music, growth, and organic material. Foghorns of 1929 displays the Synesthesia theory, which is the ability to evoke one sense with another sense. Dove uses color to suggest sound, making the work descriptive, yet abstract. Georgia O'Keeffe, another of the Circle, also started with watercolor but switched to oil, signifying a change to more modern methods. She constantly experimented with ideas and worked at developing her own artistic vocabulary of flowing organic forms, with their allusions to nature and anatomy. Alfred Stieglitz brought photography into the same state of abstraction as Dove and O'Keeffe were doing with painting. His series Songs of the Sky, based on photographs of changing cloud formations, hints that art is an ever-moving experience and that it can never fully capture nature. Later pictures in this series lose any base in nature, becoming total abstractions by cropping the images. Stieglitz's photographs become a critique of the ordinary life. 08DR/CL JSCA 60 min. |
| Marsley Hartley, an American artist of Alfred Stieglitz's Circle, traveled in Europe, primarily Germany, between 1912 and 1914 and again in the '20s and was influenced by the experimental work being done at that time, most notably intuitive abstraction, an early type of cubism. Iron Cross of 1914 is a good example of his art, with its symbolic messages and modernist portrayal in bright colors, patterns, strong lines, and overlapping forms. But the true avant-garde artists in Europe before WW I were found in Paris. Between 1907 and 1915 a group led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque created a new pictorial language, Cubism, that challenged traditional views of art. Influenced by such industrial inventions as the airplane, Cubism turned objects into intellectual exercises, creating mental gymnastics for the viewer and the artist. This new art alluded to figures, but also used texture and color to became an investigation of modern reality. In Italy this new way of experiencing reality focused on a new tomorrow, and artists there came to be known as the Futurists. These artists glorified speed, motion, violence - "dynamism." They were more aggressive and political than the French Cubists, but the two movements, Cubo/Futurism, created a new pictorial language that transformed art for the rest of the twentieth century. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Gertrude Stein, a collector, salonier, and writer, played a pivotal role in promoting cubism as a bonafide art form in the early 20th century. Born in 1874, raised in Oakland, and schooled at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University, Stein relocated to Paris in 1903, where she readily embraced the experimental art of cubists Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, passionately collecting and publicizing their works. In this program, Professor Wanda Corn presents a collection of archival photographs and cubist paintings, as well as sample writings and readings by Stein to demonstrate her importance to the emergence of cubism in Paris and the furtherance of the modernist movement. Corn speaks of Stein's fierce intellectual independence, her romantic relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and her relentless support for Picasso, whose art had been viewed by many as "chaotic, anarchistic, and out of control." Corn uses excerpts from Stein's book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and her opera, The Mother of Us All, to show how Stein's writing evoked much of the same controversy and perplexity that characterized the cubists. Stein used repetition and alliteration to convey the mellifluous texture of words, and she eschewed the boundaries of time through use of what she called the "continuous present." Corn argues that throughout her life, Gertrude Stein displayed unique and unbridled acumen, justifiably earning her reputation as "an object of fascination" and as "the Mother of the Avant-Garde." 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| The International Exhibition of Modern Art, sponsored by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, offered to the American public its introduction to the avant garde art of Europe. Informally called the Armory Show of 1913 because it was so large that it had to be held in a military armory, this exhibition attracted huge crowds and created a festive, circus air that encouraged a wide range of criticism and viewpoints. The show was organized by nationality and style, and the most radical American artist was John Sloan of the Ashcan School, who depicted a woman smoking. On the other hand, European artists received severe criticism. Critics labeled the Cubist works primitive, barbaric, childish and considered them too abstract and too hard to understand, but there was a grudging respect for the cleverness of the compositions and their intellectual control. Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase became the key work of the exhibition, and this work came to represent the Cubo/Futurist movement to Americans. The public identified the Cubist language with that of American cartoons in the similar use of the dotted line to symbolize motion, the sequence of figures in frames, and the narration of form. Before the exhibition, Duchamp was an unknown artist, but he sold four works from the show and later influenced generations of artists. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Marcel Duchamp and his group in Paris were investigating motion, both man-made and natural, and in their analysis viewed motion as a metaphor for modern life. These artists took the traditional human figure and merged it with the modern machine. Then they humanized the machine, creating a dichotomy between the mechanical and the organic, a concept which never concerned the American avant garde. Three of this Parisian group, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Albert Gleizes, migrated to New York to escape World War I and to see this fabled modern city. New York represented to these artists the modernity and mechanical progress that they were investigating in their art. All three men changed their artistic style after arriving in this energetic environment. In 1915 the first notion of transatlantic art came into being, with French artists exhibiting their works and publishing articles about art in the United States. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Marcel Duchamp, the most celebrated artist from the Armory Show of 1913, migrated to New York City in 1915. As he incorporated American culture into his vocabulary, Duchamp pushed the boundaries of acceptable art. His fascination with industrial design and the machine aesthetic and his ability to be ironic and amusing while stating a truth created a new art form, which he termed "ready made" and "assisted ready made" art. Duchamp saw himself as a New York Dadaist in his loss of idealism and rejection of traditional concepts of art, and the experimental film, Entr'Acte, displays Dada elements. Written by Francis Picabia with music by Erik Satie, this short piece premiered in 1924 at an interval between the first and second acts of a ballet. Duchamp playfully participated in one portion of the film by playing chess. For Duchamp, art evolved into a mental act, becoming the first conceptual artist. His work has influenced generations of later artists, and he is now considered one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Avant-garde art in Paris changed radically after World War I, with its horrors of trench warfare and poison gas. France suffered in a way that New York could not understand. There was a new kind of realism or classicism after the war, and art became more conservative and tied to traditions. Two experimental films produced in the 1920s show the avant-garde aesthetic. Francis Picabia's Entr'Acte, seen in an earlier program in the series, shows the playfulness and humor of the New York Dadaists and their fascination with film as a means of scientific motion. A darker side, emphasizing death and violence, is expressed as well, showing lingering memories of World War I. Ballet Mechanique, a film with Cubist qualities, used specific movements and repetition to emphasize mechanical motion. Artists like Picasso and Matisse reverted to more traditional modes of painting and worked against their own innovations and experimentation. In this way they referred back to what was great in a nostalgic attempt to re-create the pre-war days. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Among the post-war, avant-garde artists in New York, there were no major losses from World War I. France had been devastated by the war and fell behind industrially, looking to the United States as the leader. The United States was experiencing prosperity, and there was a rise in national pride, a need to establish an identity separate from Europe. This new American identity was connected with modernism art, and certain sites acted as symbols for the artists. The Brooklyn Bridge became the epitome of the machine age aesthetics, and New York City came to represent all of America. Dr. Wanda Corn explains that the perfect transatlantic artist at this time was Joseph Stella, who was born and raised in Italy and immigrated to New York at the age of 19. Stella's first major work Coney Island was his response to the Armory Show and established him as a member of the modernist scene, even though he never quite fit socially. He continued to paint urban landscapes, his masterpiece being Brooklyn Bridge, a sublimely rendered, futuristic gateway to the modern city. In this work he exhibited New York as the symbol of progress and all its possibilities for the future. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Just as Joseph Stella, who was influenced by the Futurists, rendered New York in paint as the technological sublime, Charles Sheeler photographed and painted New York as the majestic. He abstracted the form from the machine age vistas, turning the buildings into Cubist shapes. Sheeler's New York is more controlled and disciplined than Stella's, and he defines his works as "Cubist Realism," which differentiates him from the European Cubists as well. The photographer Paul Strand most closely relates to Sheeler in his sharp-formed, clean-surfaced, and abstracted urban scenes. Sheeler and Strand collaborated on a film that premiered in New York in 1921 and later made a European circuit. In it was the ambiguity between the machine age and nature elements that the transatlantic artists experienced. Originally titled New York the Magnificent and later called Manhattan, this film was inspired by Walt Whitman's poem of the same name, and it displayed the language of New York that is still used by filmmakers today to symbolize this city. In the late 1920s Sheeler began to depict more traditional subjects, much as the Parisian artists did after WW I. His method was to choose simple pieces and divest them from their function in order to show an appreciation of the modern in the old. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Recent scholarly research has indicated that two additional American painters might be considered to fit within the Transatlantic Modernism school: the party hostess Florine Stettheimer and Charles Demuth. These artists have undergone major reinterpretation due to recent interest in gender and sexual themes, and their art may be termed "modernism at the margins." Both created very intimate, mostly autobiographical works that were not painted for public view, and each have had major retrospective exhibitions in the last ten years. Professor Wanda Corn suggests that Stettheimer and Demuth are among a subculture of artists within the larger avant garde group. Florine Stettheimer is best known as a hostess, party giver, and networker in the vein of Gertrude Stein, and her art deals with fashion, interior design, style, and entertaining. She was of a wealthy family who traveled and lived in Europe until World War I, when she returned to the United States. She became a sophisticated part of the New York avant-garde circle, and her portraits of Stieglitz and Duchamp show the friendships they enjoyed. Her paintings reflect a modernity of palette in her strong colors, fantasy, and exaggerated organic forms, and her subjects deal with a life of indulgence and leisure. Filled with events of the day, her works identify with modern New York and the machine age aesthetics. In The Cathedral of Art, Stettheimer narrates the New York art scene with pride and pleasure, while creating a fantasy that celebrates modern art. Symbolism also plays an important role in her paintings, and to read her paintings, you must know the players and their attributes. Although Stettheimer shared paintings with friends, she only exhibited once in her lifetime. Instead she preferred to provide a space for artists to work and produce without competition, thus allowing women their own voices within the art movement. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
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Charles Demuth is best known as a precisionist
artist, creating Cubist Realist paintings similar to those of Charles
Sheeler, the best known being My Egypt. He also worked in
watercolors, creating traditional still lifes that are very fine technically
and have a delicacy of composition very different from his paintings.
Another body of work never seen publicly in his lifetime are his watercolor
depictions of the night life and gay culture of New York in the early 20th
century. These watercolors were too revealing for society at that time but
are important now both for their artistic and cultural significance. In the
last years of his life (1923-1930), Demuth did a series of eight works
entitled Poster Portraits. These were billboards of people he
admired, and he used a secret language to identify each person, suggesting
his own closet life. These messages are fun to read and decipher and each is
sensitive to the artist's works and their themes. This series was an attempt
to merge high and popular art and has a pop quality that influenced such
contemporary artists as Robert Indiana. Demuth's masterpiece from
this series, I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, is inspired by William
Carlos Williams' poem The Great Figure, and in its references to
street culture the work hints at the actual New York. Its verbal imagery and
the ripple effect indicating movement suggest Cubist elements very similar
to the objectiveness of Williams' poetry. This type of poster promoted the
avant-garde culture as their high art could never do. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min.
Associated Program: and Enjambment: William Carlos Williams and the Imagists |
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Associated Article: Modern Love - Gerald and Sara
Murphy -The New Yorker Magazine After World War I, Europe became obsessed with all things American, especially cultural fads and assembly line techniques, and Gerald Murphy and his wife, Sara, epitomized the ex-patriot Americans in 1920s Paris. Their sense of style and fashion and their patronage of the arts made them popular among the literary set {F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway} as well as the avant-garde art circle. Although Murphy painted only fourteen works, he held a place in the French avant-garde because he promoted American products and the machine in his paintings. Murphy's The Razor of 1924 was exhibited in a French show with other Cubo/Futurists. Using the language of advertising with its large scale and poster-like quality, the painting depicts three labor-saving products from America that were distributed internationally: a safety razor, a fountain pen, and a box of safety matches. Murphy strengthens the design of each product and, by using consumer goods as his subjects, reinterprets the traditional still life. The love affair between Murphy and the French continued until the Depression. At that time the Murphys returned to the United States. Murphy never painted again, and his work was ignored until 1959-1960, when he was rediscovered and became an inspiration for the pop art movement. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
| Stanford professor Wanda Corn guides viewers through New York and Paris in the 1920s helping to break the stereotyping of African-Americans during this decade. We learn that between WWI and WWII nearly two million blacks, from the south and the West Indies, migrated to Harlem, bringing a diversity of black voice and black culture and making it an exciting and culturally rich neighborhood. And though there was still much bigotry and hatred directed towards blacks in America during this period of time, it was the first time that this country saw the potential for major art to come out of a great black community. This moment has been labeled in American history as the "Black Renaissance." But because art was also coming out of cities like Chicago, Oakland, and even Paris, France, Proferssor Corn refers to this time period as the "New Negro" Arts movement. We are shown numerous examples of African-Americans being "in vogue" in the 20s - one example is famed dancer Josephine Baker, whose high moment of fame in Paris - Revue Negre - made her a symbol of the "new woman." 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |
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Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe,
companions in life and art in spite of a 23-year age differential,
symbolized the unusual juxtapositions characteristic of the American
modernist period. In this program, Professor Wanda Corn uses representative
samples of O'Keeffe's paintings and Stieglitz's photographs to show the
impact they had on each other and on the evolution of American art. Many of
Stieglitz's 1600 photographs of O'Keeffe were "carefully posed, cropped, and
fluidly symbolic," indicative of a creative collaboration between subject
and photographer. O'Keeffe initially confined her modernist style of
abstraction, unusual vantage point, and strong form and color to the
traditionally female subject of flowers. But in the late 1920s, perhaps as
an act of social and matrimonial defiance, she began to paint New York City
skyscrapers, and later, in conjunction with yearly sojourns to New Mexico,
she employed an increasingly surreal style in depicting landscapes,
churches, and skulls, the latter dramatically symbolizing "the rich
tradition and cultural mix of the Southwest." This conscious change in
subject matter was a reflection of O'Keeffe's strong artistic spirit and her
determination to reconnect with traditional America, to "embrace the
historical rural past with modernist techniques and perspectives," and to
gain recognition not as a female artist, but as an artist of the American
Southwest. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. Associated Programs: and NY: Symbolism and Abstraction in the Stieglitz Circle, Parts 1 & 2 |
| Transatlantic Modernism came to a natural ending between 1930 and 1935 when the Depression affected both the culture and art. The playfulness, optimism, and prosperity of the 1920s soon evolved into a different type of art in the 1930s, breaking the spell of the machine age. The transatlantic flow stopped when the Depression limited travel. New York was not the mecca it once was. The art of the 1930s evoked other areas of the United States rather than New York, created new symbols, and was tied to some cause or need. Art colonies thrived as art-making became decentralized. Government entered the art world as a patron, creating subsidies for artists. Different styles and themes emerged as art was allowed to become more populous. A revolt against urban, modern art ensued. Art for the locals was easier to understand. Does modernism die when it isn't central to the culture? In this instance it survived in interesting ways before it strengthened after World War II. Some artists identified with other aspects of American culture and adapted to the times. Fundamental changes in magazine design, fashions, interior design, and advertising show this adaptation. The nature of Modernity has shaped contemporary visual culture. Even today the best views of New York are seen from the height of a skyscraper, from the water for the skyline, or from a bridge, preferably the Brooklyn Bridge, symbol of the machine age for so many artists. 08DR/CL SCA 60 min. |