Modern Art

• Defining modernism: modern refers to a period dating roughly from the 1860s through 1970 . Modernism was not one movement, but rather a multiplicity of ‘isms’.

• We are focusing on works post 1900.

Abstract ExpressionismPost WW II

• Abstract expressionism: originated in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and aimed at subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the creative spontaneous act (e.g., action painting).

• The emphasis is on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. What does it feel like.

• New York replaced Paris as the center of the artistic world.

Jackson Pollock“You don’t look at a rose and ask what it means”

Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950

Lavender Mist

• It looks like an aerial photograph of a city, but it is a city that has somehow been blasted . . . It also looks like astronomical photographs of nebulae and galaxies . . . while at the same time close up details of this and other paintings resemble microscopic photos of molecular structures.

Jackson Pollock

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrVE-WQBcYQ

Summertime

Autumn Rhythm Number 1, 1950

Full Fathom Five, 1947

Eyes in the Heat, 1946"This is not art--it's a joke in bad taste." --Reynolds News headline, 1959

Georgia O’Keefe

Radiator Building, Night, New York

1926 - Yellow Calla

1930 - White Camelia

1927 - Red Poppy

1931 - Red, White, and Blue

1929 - Black Cross, New Mexico

1965 - Sky Above Clouds IV

Edward Hopper'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.'

Nighthawks

Automat

New York Movie 1939

Rooms By the Sea

Pop Art

• "The term first appeared in Britain during the 1950s and referred to the interest of a number of artists in the images of mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products.

• Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art.

The Big Guns of Pop Art

Andy Warhol Roy Lichtenstein

Andy WarholTurquoise Marilyn 1962

Mickey Mouse 1981

Campbell's Soup Can 1964

Whaam! 1963

Roy LichtensteinDrowning Girl 1963