Modern Art (pt. 9)

The early work of Stuart Davis was influenced by the Ashcan School.  The artist borrowed from the artistic school's selection of simple subject matter over the Cubist abstraction of European art during the early 1900s, but Davis wanted to paint with a totally new approach to style.  Early in his career, the artist set out to find a new visual language with which to express himself through art.  He nailed an electric fan, a pair of rubber gloves, and an egg beater to a table and for a year painted only these.  This experiment drew him away from a reliance on subject matter and opened his eyes to the possibilities of abstraction.  With these discoveries, the artist returned to his old affinity for the subjects in urban America but returned to these subjects through the lens of abstraction; and his 1938 painting Swing Landscape is a product of this blend.

Whereas the abstract works of Kandinsky and Pollock functioned as abstract artworks in order to communicate broad, intangible ideas or themes, this painting is of very real subject matter.  Davis has here painted a collage of the American urban landscape, complete with buildings, street signs, sidewalks, and other recognizable objects, but he has painted the scene as he felt it and heard it in addition to how he saw it.  It's largely just a collection of colors, shapes, and textures suggested by real-world objects, and on the canvas it appears abstract.  This revolutionary combination of two otherwise polar opposites, realism and abstraction, broadens the ability of art to express an idea or capture an impression via any stylistic approach.  But the implications of such a work are not merely that an artist can possess absolute freedom in approaching a subject matter; inherent within the ideology of a painting like Swing Landscape is the notion that a concrete subject contains a multiplicity (or abstraction) of interpretive expression.  Davis suggests that there is more to the landscape scene of urban America than the physical look of it.  Within every object resides an ether or an abstract quality (or several qualities) that art can bring out through realism and/or abstraction.  Here the artist has expressed some of the potential for that breakthrough in artistic freedom by so colorfully and stylistically recreating an otherwise ordinary scene.

Modern Art (pt. 8)

In the spirit of American realism, Grant Wood's famous painting, American Gothic, reads today as one of the most culturally recognizable and nationalistic works in U.S. history.  Also, I think this one wins for most parodied artwork.

The artist typically painted rural scenes using a style of realism modeled after that of the Flemish and German works.  This painting definitely captures some of the simplistic, rigid style of the European Gothic period, but it also fits in a wealth of symbolism that adds satirical commentary on its subject.  We see a farmer and his daughter, standing tall and rigid, with the male (the taller of the two) in front and the woman behind, communicative of the stereotypical roles of men and women during this time (the 1930s).  The man holds a pitchfork, delineating his role as the worker and breadwinner of the family.  The male farmer also takes up the larger part of the canvas and is the one to make eye contact with the viewer, engaging the outside world, whereas the woman stares submissively off to the side.  Behind them stands their house, painted white and vaguely resembling a church steeple.  They are victors of the American Dream, are they not?  This hardworking capitalist, with his property, produce, and pride, stands inflexibly rigid with a tight fist gripping his tool.  Something so straightforwardly cliché and idealistic, the subject and style of this artwork gives off several hints of social satire in the joyless, quasi-comical faces of the two figures alone.  Yet critics have argued for a certain aspect of genuine reverence in the work, perhaps establishing this American family's plight in the world as something sacred and worthy enough to be reconstructed in a Gothic-style painting reminiscent of a Jan Van Eyck portrait.  With all of its contemporary parodies, it's probably evident to say which interpretation the current public and media have opted for, but it's always interesting to see the individual reactions this work inspires.  Some people take this painting very seriously as an honest appraisal of the American standard for success.  The artwork itself is ambiguous, merely offering an image with numerous ideological implications and ample symbolic significance and opening it up to public interpretation.  We'll see more of art functioning as a cultural medium a bit later on when we get to Andy Warhol.

Modern Art (pt. 7)

Another point about Georgia O'Keeffe's artwork which receives a lot of attention particularly today is her latent sexual imagery.  Many within her series of flower paintings contain double-readings of the plant as a symbol for nature and Mother Nature.  In characterizing this aspect of her subject matter, then, the artist has often painted vague likenesses to the female anatomy.  The maternal breast of Mother Nature may be implied here, whereas other works by the artist show flowers that look like a vagina.  This controversial reading causes us to question what we're seeing when O'Keeffe enlarges an ordinarily small plant to the size of an entire canvas—some filling enormous canvases up to nearly six feet wide.  Is this a statement on sexuality?  After all, flowers are often held to be symbols of femininity.  This could be the personal expression of the artist herself, finding an element of her own human nature in an object from nature; or it could fall back on the role of viewer perception in appreciating artwork.  Like I said, these works are not Surrealistic, but one sees the possibility to perceive, even within commonplace items like flowers, images within images through art and the ability of the painter to stylistically portray subject matter in any way he or she wants.

Modern Art (pt. 6)

The American artist Georgia O'Keeffe began her official artistic career in Texas, where she became an art teacher in public schools.  Her art around this period of her life, which she produced in her spare time, showed immediate fascination in the beauty of the dry, open, western landscape.  While in Texas, she began to paint watercolors based on her response to the flat, stark surroundings.  She drew her inspiration from nature and would continue to do so even after she moved to New York and for the rest of her long career.  Her subjects often reflected the environments which she saw along her travels.  She painted pictures of New York skyscrapers as well as the deserts and mountains of her beloved southwest.  This broader view of nature and attention to large landscapes (such as one will find in the desert) imbued her art with a tone of vastness and natural beauty.  The simple elegance of her style also denoted a form of American realism in her approach to painting.  But her later career turned to a different focus, something very small and otherwise ordinary and cliché; yet her emphasis on this subject matter would award her the iconic artistic reputation for which she is remembered most today.

The artist turned from landscapes to flowers.  This directly contrasted her prior thematic approach to painting large subjects; nonetheless, she threw herself into her artistic study of flowers, and she chose to paint them similarly to the way in which she fashioned her landscape scenes.  Because a flower is so small, so easy to overlook, O'Keeffe was determined to paint it in such a way that it could not be ignored.  The result was a startling close-up view, painted in sharp-focus.  Here she's painted a super zoom-in close-up of a White Flower on Red Earth, and the bud takes up almost the entire canvas.  The before-gentle blossom now becomes a thing to lose oneself in, it's almost that daunting.  It is, unto itself, a globe of nature with a centrifugal growth and fully rounded diameter.  Its expansion toward the viewer in the painting seems almost to envelop us, drawing us into the central stigma of the flower.  Certainly no flowers which we have looked at in art history have ever been painted this way.

Of course a flower bears connotative symbolism.  Flowers often stand for beauty, nature, and love.  To paint these subjects in such a new light carries with it the implications of that approach onto the symbolic interpretation of such imagery.  Certainly beauty functions appropriately as an artistic aesthetic, to enlarge a flower to take up the whole canvas of a painting.  I mean, one of the expectations we bring to the table when we look at art is that we want it to be beautiful, right?  (Do you find these paintings beautiful?)  Or maybe there is something unsettling about expanding something so small to a larger-than-life size, an image stark, vivid, and in-your-face.  Is this an expression of love (another common association of flowers as symbols)?  Whether or not accurately suited to a connotative theme, O'Keeffe's flowers strike the eye, like Magritte's apple in The Listening Room, as objects blown out of proportion, almost surreally large and, in a way, intimidating in their huge, central placement within the frame.  But it's not anything surreal; it's just a painting of a flower.  This is the ability of art to alter perspectives on otherwise small or ordinary phenomena.  To separate the traditional representation of the flower into a completely new style of appearance is consistent with the ideological movements within Modern Art, which largely sought to redefine art within the Postmodern world.

Modern Art (pt. 5)

Many people find a liberating quality to the artwork of Jackson Pollock, as if it lifted away the oppressive boundaries of artistic creation, allowing artists free reign to splash paint onto canvases and do whatever they want.  While there are inherent positive benefits to such an emancipation, a good counter-argument remains that completely unrestricted art forms cease to function as art, both for the public and for the artist; and that therefore, creative expression through art cannot purely exist in such anarchical genres as Abstract Expressionism.  There are still many people who would argue that paintings like this are not art.  And what can we say to that?  For both artist and audience, a work such as this (Pollock's painting, Lucifer) did not apply to the standard criteria for art—in fact, it intentionally deviates from art, in a way, by becoming solely about the individual's act of making something.  Clearly, this is something broader than mere art, something more abstract in conception and execution than "I'm making a painting."  So, what is going on here?  Is this art?  Perhaps more practically: should we interpret this as art?  Abstract Expressionism certainly doesn't want to be tied down to any restrictive framework.  Wouldn't it be an ironic contradiction, then, to take such an abstract entity and label it as one thing or another, an art style or a movement of art history?  Or is art something so vast that it can encompass the abstract without pushing specifics or regulatory standards on its object?  Can art freely cover all areas, abundantly broad in definition even to include the nameless, abstract, incomprehensible works?  It brings us back to the question, what is art?  Perhaps it is an entity as abstract as Pollock's paintings themselves; or perhaps you disagree, which is equally arguable.

Modern Art (pt. 4)

Perhaps the culminating realization of Abstract Expressionism found itself in the artwork of Jackson Pollock.  Pollock's works center around the personally expressive effusion of the artist.  His work was about the process of creating a work of art—an element purely for the artist's experience, not relating in any way to art critics, the public, the historical tradition of art, or any other outside influence.  You might think, then, that the work of such an artist would not attract any attention in the public community; and, surprisingly, you'd be wrong.  Jackson Pollock's famous painting, No. 5, from 1948, sold at auction in 2006 for $140 million, making it the world's most expensive painting—(until 2011, when a Cézanne attracted a significantly higher amount at a private auction).

Pollock's No. 5 is an 8' x 4' canvas of paint splatters that the artist poured and threw onto the canvas.  Often flicking his dabbed paintbrush at the canvas, often pouring it directly from the can, and even occasionally stepping on top of and walking over the canvas, the artist allowed artistic aesthetics and subject matter to fly completely out the window because his art was about his own relationship to the painting through creation (and it's more interesting to do all of those things than nitpick for hours over small details).  This painting, untitled except for a numerical designation, contains no concrete subject matter, realistic imagery, or manifest theme.  In that sense, there's almost nothing to be said about a painting like this; it is a personal work of the artist and existing thematically only within the abstract expressionism of his personal emotions tied to it and physical relationship to the creative process of the work.  And yet this is the second highest selling painting in the world.  What do you think is to be so desired in a painting like this?

In a way, this is a deconstruction of art, similar to the function of Kandinsky's paintings, except for one important difference.  Kandinsky's abstraction was purely visual; Pollock, acting akin to the flow of Postmodern thought, took that concept of abstraction further to apply to art theory, theme, creation, and craft.  This painting is not initially a statement on the progression of artistic practice through history; it is, first and foremost, a product of intimate self-expressionism, like Van Gogh's asylum artworks.  It is totally abstract, removing itself away from the institutionalized ideology of art on a whole and bringing it totally within the realm of the individual's complete freedom and privacy.  Yet indirectly, Pollock's artwork affected the trend of art history on a whole because Abstract Expressionism (even the most personal form of intimate artistic creation) became, in Postmodernism, equivocal to the larger forms of art technique—and, in fact, any form of art technique.  Paint splatters on a giant canvas with no manifest attention to communicable theme, subject matter, or technical inventiveness become just as relevant as (or maybe even more relevant than) a work by Leonardo da Vinci in the Postmodern art world.

Modern Art (pt. 3)

Abstract Expressionism, once again, isn't always immediately about self-expression.  Oftentimes accomplishing new techniques for art theory, this kind of art (mainly a 20^th century phenomenon) brought emotion specifically into the construction of the painting—the physical construction.  The act of painting itself could communicate emotion and ideology.  In that sense, form is still taken into account, but much of these paintings' aesthetics are completely ignored or given up to abstraction or random layout.  The expression is not in anything concretely visible anymore, like Van Gogh's thick globs of paint or vivid colors.

Willem de Kooning's Woman I demonstrates this stylistic approach to painting (also his Woman III personifies the concept well, but we only need to look at one).  In terms of abstraction, the style of painting has completely contradicted, and therefore counter-acted, the subject matter.  Typically shown in art as regal models or majestic goddesses, the female sex gets presented here in a completely different light.  This is a violent painting.  It features probably the most violent brushstrokes we've looked at so far.  The artist has slashed paint on the canvas with quickness and force, showing very little care to detail and realism.  We can only barely make out the image of a woman in all of this furious anarchy, but it is a grotesque depiction.  Large, fearsome eyes glare out above inflated nostrils and bared teeth.  There are splashes and smears of sickly-pigmented colors all over the canvas.  Clearly, this is an image of women (the unqualified "Woman" of the title bears reference to the sex in general) that has been forged out of, if not emotional expressionism, then a particular abstract, ideological approach to the subject matter.  In other words, if he had painted the woman realistically, we would lose all of the contextual significance received here in the way he has painted her—it would just be a woman.  Similarly, a realistically drawn angry woman would simply be an angry woman, but it is Willem de Kooning's technique that infuses emotion into the unqualified abstract: not of a woman but of Woman, the ideal (and likewise for its non-specific emotionalism).  The artist has an itinerary to convey the abstract of an idea when painting Woman I which won't come out through realistic depiction of subject matter; it will come out stylistically, through how he paints it.  The conceptual elements here bear several implications, alluding to the traditional artistic views of women as in opposition to the rising movement of feminism at this time.  The bosom of the figure here, in Woman I, as well as her short, stout body, reminds us of one of the earliest depictions of women in art history, the Venus of Willendorf.  Her nudity bears reference to Classical statuary, and her gaze at the viewer is reminiscent of Manet's Olympia.  All of these historic traditions of depicting females in art exist here in this painting, but through de Kooning's completely unorthodox style he reverts every one of those traditions, presenting women in an utterly new way that earned him much criticism from the art world and the public alike.