In this lecture segment, we consider American
art in the 1910s and 1920s
With a focus on the Armory Show works of art
that were in the show, as well as works by
artists contributing to American Modernism.
In the early twentieth century, an American
realist painter named Robert Henri encouraged
his students to paint what they saw and especially
to focus on works of art that depict urban
life.
He trained in Paris from 1888 to 1891 and
brings those lesson to bear on his production
at home.
Think about his basic mission—to depict
the here and now and to focus on people in
cities—this is what we saw Manet and the
Impressionists doing in the 1860s and 1870s!
But in 1900, Henri feels that by training
his students to choose these types of topics
and to paint in a realist style, they will
be able to create something other than an
American version of Impressionism, they will
be able to make something new and American,
to create a unique American contribution instead
of what some perceived as American artists
borrowing from European art.
He painted this depiction of his neighbor’s
daughter, Eva Green, on Christmas day in 1907.
He shows this little girl with a sense of
immediacy, as if she has paused in her movement
to pose for him—we see gestural brushstrokes,
especially in the forehead and temple—his
depiction of her is direct, immediate, and
authentic, and shows the influence of Baroque
art, especially Dutch and Spanish, and French
Realism.
Just a few years later, American art undergoes
a massive shift—from realism and impressionistic
works to more modern trends.
In 1913, some artists related to Henri, called
the Association of American Painters and Sculptors,
organized the International Exhibition of
Modern Art in New York City at an old armory.
The exhibition, which you see here, had about
400 works by European artists, including French
Romanticism, Courbet, Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne,
Picasso, Matisse, Kirchner, Kandinsky.
About 1000 works by American artists were
shown—especially those like Henri who advocated
for this gritty urban realism.
Henri painted this nude for the Armory Show
specifically—to encapsulate how he thought
of himself as an artist—to show how he positioned
his work in relationship to art production
at that time, to show what he was capable
of.
He chose the female nude as his subject matter—which
we have seen so many times—and in choosing
something so canonical, he’s making quite
a statement about what he saw as his modernism,
as his unique contribution—he shows us an
unidealized female figure, a modern woman,
a woman of 1913.
But, when this work was shown alongside Matisse,
whose Blue Nude was in the Armory Show, Henri’s
seemed provincial, passé, and old fashioned,
not the modern triumph he was hoping for.
Let’s look at Henri’s Figure in Motion
in comparison to this work by French artist
Marcel Duchamp.
His 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase
No. 2 depicts a figure moving down the stairs,
clearly showing the influence of Picasso’s
cubist visual language, seeing a figure broken
up into planes and then put back together
so that we as viewers see everything all at
once—the form and the movement—like a
Futurist robot moving through space.
We see another stark contrast between the
trends in European modernism and where American
art stood at that time—Henri’s realist/Impressionist
take on a nude and Duchamp’s cubist/futurist
approach.
Critics at the time hate Duchamp’s work—it
is compared to an explosion in a shingles
factory and Theodore Roosevelt says that the
rug in his bathroom is more successful than
the painting.
For American artists, the Armory Show is a
rude awakening.
A friend of Robert Henri’s who was also
trying to make American art modern, as they
understood that to be, told Henri after the
show, (quote) “We are now old fogies, my
dear man.”
(end quote) Modernism and the furthering of
its trajectory was a gradual process in Europe—but
in the US, it was sudden.
The show travels to Boston and Chicago and
about quarter million people see it—the
published reviews were terrible—modern artists
whose works were shown were called “bomb-throwers”
“lunatics” “cousins of anarchists”—it
was seen by some as an alien incursion, a
menace to the public.
But, it is massively influential!
New galleries selling Modern art spring up
and some artists shift their work to be more
modern, others find their work is suddenly
more in demand and interesting to the public.
After the Armory Show, American artists consciously
shift, an almost overnight change to create
an American modernism.
And American artists have plenty of influences—including
Duchamp who brought Dada to New York when
he immigrated in 1915.
He has a significant influence on American
art, especially as regards the definition
of art and art as idea.
You see him here in front of a replica of
his most well-known work.
And here is a self-portrait in which he tore
a piece of paper and doing so produced his
silhouette without his really trying, like
the Jean Arp collage we looked at.
In 1913, he began using mass-produced objects
in his art.
Like these two examples, one of bicycle wheel
on a stool, and one of a snow shovel.
Both of these are found objects, like what
we saw with Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered
cup.
The artist took an object from the everyday
world and transformed it into a work of art.
In both the case of the cup and the Bicycle
Wheel, the artist altered the found object,
covering it in fur or hooking it to a stool,
but in the case of the snow shovel, he moves
it from one context, the hardware store, to
the wall of a gallery and transforms it into
art with an idea—he calls it art so it is
art—it is a ready made, ready made art,
no alteration required.
His 1917 Fountain is a ready made—a urinal
moved from the porcelain manufacturer not
to a men’s restroom but to an exhibition.
He gave it a new context and transformed it
into art.
He did not alter it except to change its orientation
and to inscribe it with a fake artist’s
name and a date.
He did this to push the envelope on the American
art establishment, to prompt questions of
the definition of art and to ruffle feathers,
succeeding in doing just that.
An artist who was working in a modernist vein
before the Armory Show is Georgia O’Keeffe.
She was from a farm in Wisconsin—and studied
art in Chicago and New York and worked as
an art teacher.
You see here one of her early charcoal drawings
when she was experimenting with abstraction—at
around the same time we saw European artists
like Malevich exploring non-objective works.
Some of her drawings made their way to New
York City and to Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer
and gallery owner who put together exhibitions
of works by European modern artists, like
Matisse and Cézanne, at his gallery 291 that
he opened in 1905.
He tried to further the development of American
modernism through exposure and by giving American
artists working in a more modernist vein a
place to show their work.
He was impressed by O’Keeffe’s drawings,
like the one you see here, which shows abstracted
organic forms of simple shapes and lines—Stieglitz
showed her work in 1916, just three years
after the Armory Show, and included this drawing.
O’Keeffe moved to New York and became part
of the burgeoning American modernism—eventually
marrying Stieglitz.
In this 1926 painting, we see her interest
in city life in this close to the ground,
worm’s eye view of New York skyscrapers
at night.
She transforms the skyscrapers, this quintessentially
modern type of structure, into planes of color,
vertical geometric forms that tower above,
framing a low-hanging moon.
She boils down the forms of the buildings
into simple shapes, contributing to Precisionism,
which was a movement in the 1920s and early
1930s that had artists creating views of cities
and the increasingly modern world in America,
which often use cubist visual language, these
simple planes of color and geometric shapes,
to build form.
Scholars have talked about the claustrophobic
nature of this view and its ominous feeling---and
that may be what O’Keeffe intended or felt.
Just a few years later, she began spending
time in New Mexico, eventually trading the
tightly packed and enclosed life of the city
for the bright sunshine and wide-open spaces
of New Mexico.
O’Keeffe’s approach to abstraction and
her contribution to an American brand of modernism
continued with her flower paintings, including
this example from 1930.
She adopts a close view of this flower, blowing
it up so that we as viewers are forced to
notice its details—this, to her, was both
abstraction and realism.
She said, “Nothing is less real than realism…it
is only through selection, by elimination,
by emphasis that we can get at the real meaning
of things”—she again boils down her subject
into clear form, a simple visual language
of basic shapes, few colors, nesting the larger
shapes together and creating an undulating
rhythm that highlights the natural, organic
character of her subject—it’s not fully
abstracted, but this is still an abstraction,
a simplification of form, here transformed
from a small flower to a large painted view.
Photographer Edward Weston created close,
often fragmented, views of objects.
He contributed to the establishment of photography
as a modern medium used to magnify the trends
of American modernism.
He primarily worked in California, after traveling
and training in his home state of Illinois.
Like many photographers, he worked as a portraitist
for a while—but then he shifted to creating
close views of figures or objects.
In this example, he depicts a bell pepper,
which he placed in a funnel, and then boxed
in his subject within the frame of the picture,
and like O’Keeffe, he denies the viewer
any reference to the actual size of the object
he shows—this object could be tiny, this
object could be huge—we can’t tell.
He takes an object from the natural world
and abstracts it with how he lights it and
frames his shot.
At the same time, we see the human figure
in this work as well—if we compare it to
the classical Belvedere torso that we saw
Michelangelo and Rubens using, we see the
hunched spine of the figure, the rippling
muscles, and shoulders.
Weston created pure, clear, carefully planned
views of objects from nature that give them
abstracted form.
The growth of an American version of modernism
that we see in O’Keeffe and Weston and many
other artists is a significant development
in the 1910s and 1920s, but there are other
currents as well, which we will next turn
to.
