Context• Prewar intellectual & art currents

– Duchamp, Benjamin, Greenberg, avante garde & kitsch– Surrealism– automatism, automatic drawing, psychology, the

unconscious

• Effects of WWII• Movements:

– US: Abstract Expressionism (AbEx)• aka 'The New York School', 'The Irascibles'

– Europe: Art Informel (Art without Form), Michel Tapie– Japan: Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Concrete or Embodied

Art Association)

Beginnings: 20th C Art & Ideas

• Marcel Duchamp (doo-shahm) & The Readymade

• Walter Benjamin (ben ya meeen) & Mechanical Reproduction

• Clement Greenberg & Kitsch• Surrealism

• Alfred Steiglitz photograph of The Fountain, 1917

                              

• Signed “Louise Norton”

• "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view -- he created a new thought for the object.“

Marcel Duchamp

• Readymades• “Concept, not

retina”• “The viewer

completes the work of art.”

The Readymade

• “The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anaesthesia.”

• (Left: In advance of a broken arm, 1915)

• Rrose Selavy• “Eros, c’est la

vie”• “Love, that’s life”

• Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919

Things to think about:

• What is kitsch according to Clement Greenberg, and how do modern appropriations of Mona Lisa fit into this idea?

• How do these take-offs on Mona Lisa illustrate Benjamin’s claims about the effect of mechanical reproduction on the work of art?

Which of these requires "initiation into their [artists'] craft" to understand?

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911

Norman Rockwell, The Love Song, 1926

http://www.googleartproject.com/

Surrealism

• SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.--Andre Breton

Joan Miro, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924

Postwar Art

(After WWII, 1945)

World War II (WWII)

• worldwide casualties• the Holocaust• the atom bomb• biochemical weapons• refugees• rise of totalitarian Communism

• Air raid in Broadgate, England during WWII

• Hiroshima after atom bomb

After WWII

• “The American Century”– Postwar economic boom– Victory and rebuilding Europe & Japan

• New York as new center of art world– European artists had fled from war & Hitler– Economic center of the world– “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art”

– Serge Gilbault’s history of Abstract Expressionism