TD 313 – Basket Weaving Basics

SCUL 349 – Wax Piece I

TD 313 – Basket Weaving I

HA 261 – Pop Art

• Popular culture
• Bright colours
• “Kitsch-y”

Hamilton

Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1955

• Photomontage. Collage of consumer culture. Popular culture invading homes after the war.
• Advertisement for “This is Tomorrow” exhibition, featured in exhibition
• Interested in shaped identity through mass culture and advertisement
• Explosion of growth in industry post WWII
• Wife and friends cut up magazines, takes clippings and creates image.
• Interior 1950s apartment. Slightly displaced objects. Magazine clipping framed and placed on wall.   Pollock-esque drip painting rug. Innovative vacuum.
• Repeated female nude figure in art history. Greco-Roman nude figure.
• Strategically placed Tootsie Pop
• Race: Advertisement on theatre outside for the film The Jazz Singer. Controversial movie involving white man putting on black face and performing as an African American.
• Gender: Different types of women of the era.
• Copyright? Not as large an issue as it was today. It was a parody.

Johns

Target with Four Faces, 1955

• Boundary between object from everyday life and work of art
• Painting relates to both art and life. Act in the gap between the two
• Four plaster casts of faces. Hinge door that could fold over and cover.
• 33 X 26”
• Assemblage
• Wax, paint, pigment on canvas. Plaster cast, wooden box.
• Encaustic. Melted wax incorporated with pigment then applied to surface.
• Strips of newspaper added.
• Picking overlooked objects in everyday life.
• Enigmatic. Puzzling. Conceptually rich.
• Can’t see eyes. Sense of tension with target. Venerability
• Psychological? Issue of perception?
• Link to Goya’s Execution. Overt. Tension.

Rauschenberg

Canyon, 1959

• Darker, not so much celebrating popular culture
• Combine Paintings. Combination of sculpture and painting.
• Dirty pillow suspended. Stuffed bird. Found objects from urbane environment
• Figure reaching up. Mimicking Statue of Liberty image.
• Chaotic experience of NYC conveyed through application of paint. Haphazard.

Warhol

32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962

• Commercial illustrator in NYC. Central figure.
• Takes the most boring things and makes them into art objects.
• Drank Campbell’s soup everyday for 20 years. Immerses self in culture.
• As if stacked upon one another. Mimicking of grocery shelf. Both grid and can is repeatable.
• Deliberateness as he is pulling from Pop Culture but also critiquing it.

HA 261 – The New York School: Abstract Expressionism

• Gesture, action, drip painting

• Colour Field painting

Greenberg

How does Greenberg define a cultural phenomena of “avant-garde” and “kitsch”? Provide specific examples.

• Avant-garde is evolving techniques of the masters, kitsch is more of a mockery
• A.g: Art for arts sake. Not representing the time but making it atheistically pleasing. Kitsch similar but for the lower class
• Kitsch: produced by the lower class for the lower class.
• A.G: Cezanne, Picasso
• Kitsch: Hitler’s using kitsch to control masses. Russian artwork. Primitive.

On page 15, Greenberg summarises…

• A.G: Person has to go through process to understand it. Kitsch: Artist has done all the work for the audience to understand.
• A.G: formal. Kitsch: Lower class.

According to Greenberg, how are the strategies of the…

• Fascism, Hitler, totalitarianism: used as a means to control masses. Couldn’t use avant-garde because he couldn’t control it as much as Kitsch
• Kitsch, easier to hide propaganda. A.G was too innocent. Education of masses linked more to Kitsch.
• Hitler used expressionist artists because they were popular in Germany.

Gesture, Action, Drip Painting

Pollock

Male and Female, 1942

• Inspired by Native American sand painting
• Rhythmic painting, gestural brushstrokes
• Colours of sand painting, shapes, movement
• Tapping into unconscious when making sand paintings, Pollock wanted to mimic
• Jungian: Collective unconscious.
• Random shapes that fell out of hand onto canvas
• Black field with scribing on top.
• Unstable, chaotic on top of blue background

Hans Namuth film about Jackson Pollock

• Outside the studio, large canvas on ground
• Direct painting
• Prefer stick to brush. Dripping fluid paint. sand, broken glass, pebbles.
• Control flow of paint. No accident.
• No fear of changing the image or destroying it. Life of its own.

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950

• Unprimed canvas. Paint soaks in more easily.
• Not stretched over structure before painted
• Balance of colour. Patterns and rhythms spaced out
• Heaviest at bottom.

Krasner

Untitled (from Little Images series), 1949

• Studio inside the house in comparison to Pollock working outside
• Paint squirted onto canvas
• No hierarchy of imagery

The Seasons, 1957

• Vegetable-like shapes. Organic curvilinear
• Structured
• Abstracted landscape

Colour Field Painting

• Interested in fields of colours and resonance
• Meditative state from size

Rothko

No. 61, Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue, 1953

• Not referencing anything in the real world
• Emotional resonance with the colours. Meditative experience in front of the painting
• Subject matter: colour and rectangles
• Rusty red juxtaposed against darker blue underneath

Newman

Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950 – 51

• Freeing from association, myth, memory.
• Simplified composition
• Red interrupted by zips. Slightly varying width.
• Zip has vibrating quality. Tricks of the eye.

Reinhardt

Abstract Painting, Blue 1953

• Grid-like squares emerge the more you look at it
• Arms of the cross. Religiosity.
• Unconscious experience

FMS 321 – Postwar Japanese Film

Timeline

• US Occupation of Japan (1945 – 52)
• US – Japan Security Treaty (1951, renewed 60, still active)
• The Korean Conflict (1950 – 53)
• The Vietnam War (1965 – 73)

S.C.A.P. – The U.S. Occupation of Japan

• Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers
• Unlike Germany or Italy, Japan’s occupation was primarily American
• Goal was to eradicate “feudalism in Japanese society
• Reconstruction was widespread and deep including education, law, philosophy, politics, cultures, society, art, religion, land reform, etc.

Japan’s Postwar Constitution

Article 9

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of setting international disputes. (2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised.

War Responsibility

• 2 main camps
• What/ who lead America to war?
• Any ‘borrowed’ ideology may not reflect the needs of Japan

Purges and War Guilt

• War criminals divided into A, B, and C levels of importance
• Who is innocent when almost no one resisted militarism?
  • Deception as excuse
  • Victimhood (on multiple levels)
• Not a matter of self-reflection so much as subjectivity
  • Stories presented the shutaiteki or subjective will of characters
  • Victim consciousness was necessary for both Japan and the US Occupation
    • Lack of representation of US Occupation
    • Blame for war laid wholly on the government/ military
• “Victor’s Justice”

Japanese Film Industry

Postwar Japanese film oligopoly ‘the Big Six”

• Nikkatsu 1912-42, 54-
• Shochiku 1895/1920-
• Toho 1934-
• Daiei 1942-71 74-2003
• Shin-Toho 1947-61
• Toei 1950-

Daiei Studios

• Created by the wartime govt. to consolidate resources
• Absorbed smaller studios and Nikkatsu
• Integrated modern film technology
• First successful exporter of Japanese films to West
• Rashomon

Shin-Toho Studios

• Created in response to labour strikes at Toho
• Became favoured studio for leading directors
• After Toho strikes, focused on popular genres
• An early collaborator with television production

Toei Studios

• Employed many repatriates from China
• Focused on jidai-geki and war films
• Would expand into animation (mid-50s)
• Effective expansion and diversification

The Toho Strikes

• “Everything came except the battleships”
• 4 separate strikes occurring between 1946-50
• U.S. military intervention
• Suppression of the left within the film industry
• Support of the conservative right-leaning major studios

Japan’s Film Industry and the “Red Purge”

• Officially announced by decree of SCAP, Sept 1950
• Unofficially requested by the major Japanese studios before
• Similar film industry purges were conducted in Hong Kong the same year

Censorship

• Japanese Film Industry repealed wartime restrictions, banned war-themed on 8/15
• SCAP officials from Civil Information and Education (CIE) Section met with studio heads 9/20
• CIE personnel initially consisted of liberal Roosevelt-era “New Dealers” who wanted to rebuild Japan in the image of the idealised America
• CIE’s 3-point plan to (re)educate the Japanese Film industry

Banned Films

• Film Industry identified and banned 227 – 236 films with militaristic themes
• Self-censorship was conducted so as not to aggravate SCAP
• Obedience was incomplete – some films were successfully hidden
• US military rounded up films, copies were deposited at LOC, surplus was unceremoniously burned in a riverbed
• Paternal attitude of reeducation

FMS 321 – Prewar Japanese Film

Film Industry

• Dominated by 3 large vertically-integrated entertainment corporations
  • Nikkatsu (1912)
  • Shochiku (1895/1920)
  • Toho (1934)

Nikkatsu Studios

• Oldest film company
• Used stage conventions (male actors played female roles
• Integrated modern film technology
• Opened overseas offices (Taiwan, Korea, China)

Shochiku Studios

• Entertainment Promotion Company (Kabuki)
• Extensive theatre holdings
• Long-term contracts with actors
• Rights to theatrical plays
• Latecomer to film – modernised production methods

Toho Studios

• Diversified Entertainment Coporation
• Initially weaker than others
• Gained govt. support in ‘30s
• House style – conservative themed dramas
• Actively supported the war

Major Production Trends

• Jidai geki (Period plays)
  • Chanbara (swordfilms)
  • Historical epics
  • Psychological films
  • Musical films
• Allowed filmmakers safety to make subtle critiques of society by placing social problems in the past

• Gendai geki (Contemporary plays)
  • comedy, action, home drama
  • Shomin (“Petit-bourgeoisie” film)
  • Haha mono (“Mother” films)
  • Salariman mono (“White-collar” film)
• Often more regulated than period films
• Considered less “Japanese” by some, but popular in urban areas

Humanism

• An outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasise common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems. – Oxford Dict.

Prewar Humanist Films

• Gendai geki
  • Home Dramas (Ozu, Naruse)
  • Women’s films (Mizoguchi)
  • Children’s films (Shimizu)
  • War  Films
    • Mud and Soldiers (1939, Tasaka)
    • Five Scouts (1939, Tasaka)

Japan’s Colonial Empire

1894 5: Sino-Japanese War

1904-5: Russo-Japanese War

1910: Colonisation of Korea

1914: Shandong, Caroline Is., Marshall Islands

1931: Manchuria

1937: Full-scale war with China

1941: Pearl Harbor

1945: Defeat in WWII

Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere

• Pan-Asainist ideology – “Asia for Asians”
• Anti-colonial liberation and initially extremely well-received by indigenous peoples
• Claimed that shared cultural proximity united “Asian races”
• Japan presented itself as the “leading race” (shido minzoku) of Asia, its “natural” leader
• Other races were to support Japan “each in their appropriate place” (natural and or human resources)
• Cultural Assimilation policies (language, culture, education, etc.)

Humanist War Films

• Based on best-selling novels
• Portrayed soldiers as individual human beings involved in everyday events
• Humanised the difficulties of army life thereby creating sympathy
• Critiqued by the govt. as portray the army as weak or “exhausted”

HA 261 – Modernism in Europe and Surrealism

Modernist Architecture in Europe

de Stijl

Gerrit Rietveld

Schröder House, 1925

• Areas of empty space, rectangles, but our minds close them together into a building
• Use of primary colours. White panels. Black posts and railings.
• Alternating panels and glass fit into one another

“Red-Blue” Chair, 1925

• Rudimentary. Basic Elements.
• Not for comfort.
• Pre-cut lumber shapes to create chair. Uniformity. Easy of building. Easily mass produced.

Bauhaus

Walter Gropius

Bauhaus Building, Dessau, Germany, 1925 – 26

• Closed by Hitler in mid 30s
• Combining craft with function-ability. High and low art.
• Art serving a social function. Institute of design.
• Worked and lived in the building.
• Lots of window. Looking out and in. Access.
• Objects that can be mass produced.
• Women accepted into the school

Marianne Brandt

Coffee and Tea Service, 1924

• Cast in cheap materials and mass produced for the public.
• Lines sleek and polished. Elegant forms.
• Utilitarian and streamline

Bedside Lamp, 1928

• Rounded shape to focus light. Pivot at the head of the lamp.

Marcel Breuer

Armchair, Model B3, “Wassily” Chair, c. 1927-28

• Intersecting planes of tubular steel
• Inspired to use materials as he was riding bicycle

Surrealism

• Represent real things and making them seem uncanny
• Sur: On/ Over
• Originates in 1924 survives WWII
• Cultivate imagery in a state beyond logical perception

Max Ernst

Forest and Sun, 1925

• Design to rubbing. Forms not of the artist’s conscious control.
• Circumvent the rational mind by engaging with approach

Two Children Are Threatened By A Nightingale, 1924

• Combined painting with non-sensical objects
• Small red gate breaks out of the frame.
• Title is unsettling.
• Nightingale hovering in sky above gate.
• Children painted in greyscale, pulling them out of the colourful landscape
• Panic and despair but not sure what is happening

Joan Miró

Shooting Start, 1938

• Automatic drawing
• Odd playful floating shapes. Free of conscious thought.
• Biomorphic. Seemingly organic.
• Unplanned but has a concrete title.
• Thick black lines. Nothing pinned down.

Salvador Dalí

The Persistence of Memory, 1931

• Desolate setting.
• Was asked by a doctor to see his tongue.
• Paranoiac critical method: Juxtapositions in dialogue with one another.
• Lit by an eerie sun. Light is not consistent.
• Bottom left pocket watch died and now bugs have come to take it away

René Magritte

The Treachery of Images 1928-29

• “This is not a pipe” 
• Calling out that is is a representation
• Question that text and images can represent and replace.

Time Transfixed, 1939

• Hides the hand of the artist. Could be real.
• Reflection of mirror. Opens up space because it reflects light but here it flattens.
• Train coming out of the fireplace? Shadow cast in illusionistic way.
• Time standing still. Room sucked of air.
• Candlestick would be used as time and light. The holders are not filled.

Meret Oppenheim

Object (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure) (Luncheon in fur), 1936

• Juxtapose and unite: fur, jewellery, utilitarian objects.
• Want to touch but not drink from.
• Representation of genitalia?

Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, Munich, 1937

• Derogatory term.
• Exhibited works that were an “insult to German feeling”
• One of the most successful exhibitions of the 20th century.
• Salon des Refuse. Same idea.
• > 3 mil people went
• V&A put together a full list. Donated by a widow of a European art dealer.

HA 261 – Modernisms in America and Modernist Art and Architecture Europe

Modernism in America

Regionalism (American Scene Painting) 

Grant Wood

American Gothic, 1930

• Farmer and spinster daughter posing before house
• Title: American subject matter. Gothic style of architecture
• Lancet Window. Gothic. Like a shield of a knight.

• Dentist and sister. Looking at his life for models.
• Cropped around figures. 3/4 view.
• Stylised. Geometric. Most shadow in weather-worn facial features.
• Celebration of culture: Pride of work. Viewer set at eye-level.
• Unsympathetic view of rural life: cold or distant, not idealised.

Thomas Hart Benton

The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934

• Rich and complex composition. Elongated figures. Un-naturalistic rounding hill.
• Inspired by folk song: love ballad: jealous lover accuses of adultery, denies, and then stabs in chest.
• Foreground: Men appear to be in a bar/ saloon. Playing violin/ fiddle. Musical notes merging the background.
• Background: Swooping landscape. Away from architecture. Narrative journey.
• Female figure: Sister-in-law. Male left figure in foreground: Young Jackson Pollock

Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas

Noah Built the Ark, ca. 1927

• Foster racial tolerance across the U.S.
• Graphic artist. Cubist. African Art.
• 1/7 image made for publication: God’s Trombones.
• Monochromatic Lavender.
• Flat planes to represent scene: depth, narrative.
• Depth: Atmospheric perspective. Lighter colours further away.
• Narrative: Animals in pairs. Pointing towards the storm. Contrast between sun rays and storm. Repetition of figure.

Jacob Lawrence

No. 49 from The Migration of the Negro, 1940-41

• Series of 60 images. Struggles of separation of races.
• Moving north to find freedom from oppression.
• Applies colour on all panels before fully rendered.
• Simplified composition. Dining room scene. Rope barrier separates.
• Narrative: Left figures: more details. Poles parallel to tables.

Documentary Photography

Dorothea Lange

Migrant Mother, 1935

• Hired to document effects of The Great Depression
• Migratory pea pickers
• Cropping: History of mother and child. No idea about surroundings.
• Published to middle-class.
• Not looking at the camera. Stranger approaching, not communicating.
• Appears determined. Tired.

Modernist Architecture in Europe

de Stijl

• 2 kinds of beauty in the world: objective and subjective
• Leans towards objective.

Piet Mondrian

Apple Tree, 1908-09

• Stylised geometric abstracted view of tree. Black.
• Technique: Impressionism and Post-Impressionsm. Colour: German Expressionism and Fauvism.

Composition with Yellow, Red, and Blue, 1927

• Vertical and horizontal intrinsic to natural world.
• Life reduced down to fundamental lines.
• Neo-Plasticism. Purging of all references to reality.
• Straight lines, primary colours. White rectangles. Thick black lines. Geometric.
• Negative space becomes a plane.
• Everything is balanced. Order amongst chaos.

HA 261: Dadaism (finish) and Modernism in America

Duchamp

L.H.O.O.Q, 1919

• Verbal pun. Bilingual. “Look” “She has a hot ass”
• Cheap replication of Mona Lisa. Postcard
• Defacing. Adds facial hair. Issues of gender.
• Questioning originality in art. Authorship.

Berlin, Germany

• New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)
• Marks return to figural art

Grosz

Fit for Active Service, 1916 – 17

• Pen and brush. India inks. Jagged edged figures.
• Caricature of German military. Interior medical office. Skeletal figure examined. Award over heart.
• “K V” abbreviated phrase “Fit for active service”
• Leaders in foreground. Bureaucrats recording on right.
• Architecture: steril, rudimentary. Outside: gritty industrial.
• Child-like drawing.
• “Entrance” door sign. No escape.

Hannah Höch

Da Dandy, 1919

• New Woman seen as post-war educated. Working outside the home.
• Newspaper clippings. Collage. Photomontage.
• Cubist collage influence. Dada collage is entirely found images.
• Pulling from popular culture. Works for large publishing house. Images being printed.
• Using societal materials to critique it.
• Idealised images of femininity, cuts them up.
• Construction: focus on eyes, pearls, elegant poses,
• Silhouette shape appears more masculine. Feminine images placed inside.

Otto Dix

The Journalist Sylvia von Harden, 1926

• Painting of the idea of the New Woman
• Flat chested, sporty, male look. Page-boy hair cut. Stocking revealed.
• Cafe, night club. Enjoying a cigarette, alcohol, open cigarette case
• Hyper colours. Vermillion and magentas.
• Monocle. Accessory worn by upper class men.
• Exaggerated face powder. Sleepy look.
• Ambiguity if critiquing

Modernism in America between the World Wars

• Precisionism
• Regionalism
• Harlem Renaissance
• Documentary Photography

What is going on?

• Approach to abstraction. Artists turning to American subject matter.
• Relationship to city and country.
• Increase in Government power.
• Status of American family. Race and class.
• The Great Depression: NYC

Precisionism

• Group of artists working in proximity to each other.
• Precise use of paintbrush

Georgia O’Keeffe

Red Canna, 1924

• Young female artist showing in 291 Gallery. “At last a woman on canvas”
• Femininity linked to her work
• Red Canna Lily
• Abstracts the flower, can’t tell exactly what the subject matter is.
• Manipulates scale
• Abstraction usually associated with male artists

City Night, 1926

• Abstract viewpoint. Flat planes.
• Abstracted colour palette.
• Tilting angle. Engulfing.

Charles Sheeler

American Landscape, 1931

• Clear outlines.
• Naturalism. Simplifies structures.
• Coldness.
• Nature is contained. River. Smoke mixing with clouds.

Criss-Crossed Conveyors, Ford Motor Company, 1927

• Photographed from multiple angles
• Used as advertisement
• Technology replaced beautiful landscapes. Machine, productivity.