American Art before WW II

Textbook , pp. 389-470

Ashcan artists
George Bellows: Cliff Dwellers, 1913

Urban realists
paintings of immigrant
life, both threatening
and exciting to
mainstream
Americans

George Bellow, Stag at Sharkeys, 1909

http://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=E3OmA
aasGnA

Discussion topic due next week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkdQ2
j4RfjQ

Listen to the lecture, make notes, and write two pages summarizing
main points. Focus on following three or other excavation paintings
by George Bellows presented in the lecture. Excavation paintings
refer to construction of Pennsylvania train station in New York. What
aspects of this process did the painter choose to convey? Prepare
to speak about these paintings in class.
Background information:One of the largest building projects in the country,
Pennsylvania Station entailed the razing of two city blocksfrom Thirty-first to
Thirty-third Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Completed in 1910 (and
demolished 196366), it covered eight acres and featured a magnificent terminal
designed in the Beaux-Arts style by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White.

Penn station, 1911

John Sloan, Hairdressers Window, 1907

Election Night, 1907

More images of Sloan (no voice

over)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvU5B
U7eGl0

Lewis Hine, Little Mother in the Steel District, Pittsburg, 1909

Little Lottie, a regular oyster shucker in Alabama Canning
Co. She speaks no English

Lewis Hine, Power House Mechanic working on steam pump, 1920

Legendary Folk Hero Joe Magarac

JOE MAGARAC
I'll tell you about a steel man,
Joe Magarac, that's the man!
I'll tell you about a steel man,
Best steel maker in all the land
Steel-heart Magarac, that's the man.
He was sired in the mountain by red iron ore
Joe Magarac, that's the man!
He was sired in the mountain by red iron ore
Raised in a furnace - soothed by its roar
Steel-heart magarac, that's the man.
His shoulders are as big as the steel-mill door
Hands like buckets, his feet on half the floor
With his hands he can break a half-a-ton dolly
He stirs the boiling steel with his fingers, by golly
He grabs the cooling steel - his hands like wringers
And makes eight rails between his ten fingers
Joe can walk on the furnace rim
From furnace to furnace - just a step for him
Joe never sleeps, but he's got to eat
Hot steel soup, cold ingots for meat
Now, if you think this man's not real
Then, jump in a furnace, see him cook the steel.

 Now that we have reached the

acme of civilization with our fireproof skyscrapers and our
millions of spindles, it still remains
to climb to the height of artistic
achievement reached by the Zuni
and the South Sea Islander.
Fotographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1901

Alfred Stieglitz in his

Gallery 291
Closely associated with
modernist artists:
Marsden Hartley, Arthur
Dove, John Martin,
Georgia OKeeffe, and
occasionally with
Charles Demouth, and
photographers such as
Edward Steichen and
Paul Strand

Alfred Stieglitz
Winter Fifth Avenue, 1892
Street, Fifth Avenue

Alfred Stieglitz, Steerage, 1907

New York photo-secession group, 1902

Paul Strand, Wall Street, 1915

I was fascinated by all these little people walking by these
great sinister, almost threatening shapes

Paul Strand, Abstraction, 1915

the absolute objectivity of photography
instrument of research

Organic abstraction
coincided with Wassily Kandinskys
Arthur Dove, Alfie Delight, 1929
Nature Symbolized, no. 2, c. 1911

Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Oriental, 1918

Synchromy in Green and Orange, 1916
Morgan Russell, Synchromy, 1914-16
Synchromismcolors together

Georgia OKeeffe, Evening Star, 1917

Red and Orange Streak, oil on canvas, 1919

Georgia OKeeffe, Deers Skull

Jack in the Pulpit, 1930

Georgia OKeeffe (1887-1986)

Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz in 1918
Georgia OKeeffe by Dennis Brack, 1977

Georgia O'Keeffe

 http://www.c-spanv
ideo.org/program/3
10650-1

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending the Staircase, 1912

an explosion in a shingle factory !
R: Armory Show, New York, 1913

New York Dada

Marcel Duchamp dressed as Rrose Slavy (Eros cest la
vie)
Stieglitzs photograph of the M. Duchamps Fountain, 1917

New York Dada

the diva of Dada movement
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
God, 1918

The world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it

has in the last thirty years. Charles Pguy (1913)
Eiffel tower, 1889the symbol of banquet yearsthe
tallest man-made structure at that time

Turn of the century: la

belle poquegood
old days, time of
peace and prosperity
in Europe. Paris is in
the center of avantguard movements:
Cubism, Dada

Chicago School beginnings of modern architecture

The arrival of the office building
Louis Sullivan, Wainwright Building, St. Louis Missouri, 1890
R: under construction

The arrival of the department store

Louis Sullivan, Schlesinger and Mayer Department Store
(now Carson Pirie Scott), 1899, Chicago business district (the
Loop)
glazed terracota brick upper level
(textbook, pp. 338-344)

Detail of the radiator grill

Excerpts from Le Corbusiers Vers Une Architecture (1923), first

English translation (Towards a New Architecture) 1927

Cathedrals or tombstones?
Chrysler Building, midtown Manhattan, NY, 192832
designed by William Van Alen for industrial magnate Walter
P. Chrysler

Detail of Chrysler building: Four winged Mercury helmet

(ornament on Chrysler car)
Mercurysymbol of speed and commerce

A tribute to workers
and a tribute to Walter P. Chrysler, a self-made titan of the
automotive industry

Art Deco details

European analytical Cubism

Picasso, Portrait of David-Henry Kahnweiler 1910, Ambroise Vollard,
1910
tiny angled planes clutter and intersect (European
Cubism)

Charles Sheeler, Church Street El, 1920

Upper Deck, 1928

C. Sheeler, Rolling Power 1939

R: Wheels, photo

C. Sheeler, Chatres cathedral, photo, 1929

R: River Rouge Plant (Ford factory), Criss crossed conveyors, photo,
1927

Our factories are our substitute for religious expression. Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler, Composition Around White, 1959

Charles Sheeler, Classic Landscape, oil on canvas, 1931

Ford Motor Company's new River Rouge Plant near
Detroit

"incomparably the most thrilling I have had to work with Charles

Sheeler

Charles Demuth, the Figure

5 in Gold, 1928
The Great Figure by William
Carlos Williams
Among the rain
And lights
I saw the figure 5
In gold
On a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city

Charles Demuth, Buildings, Lancaster

My Egypt, 1927, oil on composition board, Whitney Museum, NY

Stuard Davis, Odol, oil on canvas board, 1924

incription (advertisment) says It purifies
R: Picasso-Still Life with Chair Caning, 1911-12

All my pictures have their originating impulse in the

impact of the contemporary American environment
Stuard Davis

Stuard Davis, Lucky Strike

Vernacular language of art

Stuart Davis, House and Street, 1931