asp 4 aavc 1930-40s

A visit to

America The Depression &War Years

Introduction to American Art and Visual Culture – Lecture 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3CcAD_seww

1930s

1930s• Art was patronized by US government; i.e.. photography and murals.

• Racial/ethnic-based enclaves emerged.

•Social realism documented lives of America’s poor.

Population of US 1930

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L8IseE7W-Q

(Lee Russell (1939) Abandoned house, surrounded by growing corn, McIntosh Co., Oklahoma

(Lee Russell (1939) Interior of Framhouse, McIntosh Co., Oklahoma

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fsasubjindex1.html

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal cultural programs marked the U.S. government's first big, direct investment in cultural development. In many ways, they present a mirror image of today's federal policy picture: their goals were clearly stated and democratic; they supported activities not already subsidized by private sector patrons, rather than following private patrons' leads; and they emphasized the interrelatedness of culture with all aspects of life, not the separateness of a rarefied art world.

THE NEW DEAL – Federal Works Projects

Interview Excerpt: "Why did you start singing while you work?When I started peddling that was in 1932, that's when I started singing...'Heighho, fish man, bring down you dishpan,' that's what started it. 'Fish ain't but five cent a pound....' It was hard times then, the Depression, and people can hardly believe fish is five cents a pound, so they started buying. There was quite a few peddlers and somebody had to have something extra to attract the attention. So when I came around, I started making a rhyme, it was a hit right away."...On the street whatever comes to mind I say it, if I think it will be good. The main idea is when I got something I want to put over I just find something to rhyme with it. And the main requirement for that is mood. You gotta be in the mood. You got to put yourself in it. You've got to feel it. It's got to be more or less an expression, than a routine. Of course, sometimes a drink of King Kong liquor helps.

"Transcript #21051622

http://rs6.loc.gov/wpaintro/clyde.html

WPA Photographers:Dorothea Lange

"Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

Japanese Children ‘Pledge of Allegiance” (1942)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4yT0KAMyo

WPA Photographers:Gordon Parks

American Gothic (1942)

Death Room (1949)

Red Jackson and Herbie Levy Study Wounds of Slain Gang Member Maurice Gaines (1948)

Dinner Time at Hercules Brown House, Somerville Maine (1944)

The Harlem Renaissance:1920-30s

Jacob Lawrence (1942) Pool Parlor

Jacob Lawrence Migrations Series

James Van Der Zee

James Van Der Zee (1926) Alpha Phi Alpha Basketball Team

James Van Der Zee (1926) The Wedding Party

Elizabeth Catlett b.1915

Aaron Douglas

Aaron Douglas (1934) An Idyll of the Deep South, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library

Dreams

Hold fast to dreamsFor if dreams dieLife is a broken-winged birdThat cannot fly.Hold fast to dreamsFor when dreams goLife is a barren fieldFrozen with snow.

-Langston Hughes (1902 – 67)

Archibald Motley Jr. (1936) Saturday Night Street Scene

Archibald Motley Jr. (1930s) Black Belt

Archibald Motley Jr. (1930s) Nightlife

Archibald Motley Jr. (1930s) Between Acts

Archibald Motley Jr. (1930s) Brown Girl

Archibald Motley Jr. (1936) Brown Girl

Top Hat (1935)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBOWnN3KRiA

TAKE A BREAK

1940s

1940s• due to WWII, the art center shifted from Paris

• American absorbed Cubism, Surrealism, Dada

• continued to develop “American” style; i.e.. national identity, urbanism and experience of living

Planting the Seeds of Abstract Expressionism

American isolationalism/ regionalism

Social conscious

Reconciliation between the poetry of Surrealism and the spatial issues of Cubism

Painting in the 1930s - 40s:Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky (1926-36) The Artist and His Mother

Arshile Gorky (1936-37) Enigmatic Combat

Arshile Gorky (1944) The Leaf of an Artichoke is an Owl

Arshile Gorky (1941) Garden in the Sachi

Arshile Gorky (1931-32) Study for Night, Enigma, and Nostalgia

Painting in the 1930s - 1940s:Stuart Davis

Stuart Davis (1940) Seventh Avenue Style

Stuart Davis

Painting in the 1930s - 1940s:Georgia O’Keefe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FhvyUq27t8

An amateur video taken of her exhibition at the Whitney.

www.whitney.org

www.whitney.org

Georgia O’Keefe (1930) Jack in the Pulpit IV

Georgia O’Keefe (1944) Cottonwood III

Georgia O’Keefe (1945) Pelvis Series – Red with Yellow

Painting in the 1930s - 1940s:Edward Hopper

http://www.mfa.org/hopper/explore.htmlHopper Interactive Sketchbook at MFA Boston

Edward Hopper (1942) Nighthawks

Edward Hopper (1939) New York Movie

Edward Hopper (1932) Room in Brooklyn

Painting in the 1940s:Ben Shahn

Ben Shahn (1931-32)The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

Ben Shahn Portrait of Myself as a Young Boy

Ben Shahn Blind Accordian Player

Ben Shahn Vacent Lot

Ben Shahn Handball

What then was I to paint? Slowly I found that I must paint those things that were meaningful to me–that I could honestly paint in the shapes and colors I felt belonged to them. What shall I paint? Stories.” – Ben Shahn

writer John Graham who befriended Gorky, Pollock and others, [wrote] Systems and Dialectics of Art (1937) he justifiedabstraction as distilling the essence of reality and traced its roots to primitivism, the unconscious and the painter’s empathy with the brushstroke.

AMERICAN ABSTRACTION

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v7QfCxuvLo