asp 4 aavc 1930-40s
TRANSCRIPT
A visit to
America The Depression &War Years
Introduction to American Art and Visual Culture – Lecture 4
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
(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