Online Study Guide

Revolution and World War :: Expressionism in Early 20th-Century Europe :: Embracing Abstraction :: Challenging Artistic Conventions :: Transatlantic Artistic Dialogues :: European Art in the Wake of World War I :: New Art for A New Society-Utopian Ideals :: Emphasizing the Organic :: Art As Political Statement in the 1930s :: Émigrés and Exiles: Energizing American Art at Midcentury

TRANSATLANTIC ARTISTIC DIALOGUES

Several American artists spent much of their productive careers in Europe, while a number of European artists moved to America.

Depicting the seamy side of life:

The following painting reflects the artist's ability to capture both the visual and social realities of American urban life shortly after the turn of the century.

33-27: JOHN SLOAN, Sixth Avenue and 30th Street, 1907, 1909. Oil on canvas, 26 1/4" x 32". Private Collection (Mr. And Mrs. Meyer P. Potamkin).

John Sloan

The Armory Show and Its Legacy

An influential exhibition:

The Armory Show in 1913 was a major vehicle for disseminating information about European artistic developments in the United States.

33-28: Installation photo of the Armory Show, New York National Guard's 69th Regiment, New York, 1913. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

A nude in motion:

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase is faceted in the Cubist manner and shows a single figure in a sequence of movements in an attempt to convey the sense of motion down a staircase.

33-29: MARCEL DUCHAMP, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Oil on canvas, approx. 4' 10 “x 2' 11". Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection).

Championing photography:

In his photograph The Steerage, Alfred Stieglitz used a direct, unmanipulated technique to record a moment that is made more spontaneously expressive through its mixture of found patterns and human activity.

33-30: ALFRED STIEGLITZ, The Steerage, 1907 (print 1915). Photogravure (on tissue), 1' 3/8" x 10 1/8". Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.

Moving toward abstraction:

In his photograph Nude, Edward Weston moved toward abstraction by selecting a small segment of the human body to produce a composition of fluid curves and dark and light areas.

33-31: EDWARD WESTON, Nude, 1925. Platinum print. Collection, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

A wickedly funny gift:

Man Ray used chance and the dislocation of ordinary things from their everyday settings to surprise his viewers into new awareness. In his sculpture Gift, he subverted the proper function of a laundry iron by attaching to it a row of spikes. In Lucky Strike, Stuart Davis uses discontinuities and interlocking planes of Cubism to imbue the image with dynamism and rhythm.

33-32: MAN RAY, Cadeau (Gift), ca. 1958 (replica of 1921 original). Painted flatiron with row of 13 tacks with heads glued to the bottom, 6 1/8" high, 3 5/8" wide, 4 1/2" deep. Museum of Modern Art, New York (James Thrall Soby Fund).

An elegy to a dead officer:

Marsden Hartley developed a style that he called “Cosmic Cubism."

33-33: MARSDEN HARTLEY, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914. Oil on canvas, 68 1/4" x 41 3/8". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Alfred Stieglitz Collection).

Syncopated cubism:

STUART DAVIS created what he believed was a modern American art style by combining the flat shaped of Synthetic Cubism with his sense of jazz tempos and his perception of the energy of fast paced American culture.

33-34: STUART DAVIS, Lucky Strike, 1921. Oil on canvas, 2' 9 1/4" x 1' 6". Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of The American Tobacco Company, Inc.). Copyright © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

A Harlem renaissance artist:

In Noah's Ark, Aaron Douglas incorporated motifs from African sculpture into a Cubist composition of transparent angular planes.

33-35: AARON DOUGLAS, Noah's Ark, ca. 1927. Oil on masonite, 4' x 3'. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee.

Precisionism

Precisionism explored machine imagery and its place in modern life using a modernist vocabulary largely derived from Synthetic Cubism.

Art of the machine age:

Precisionism developed in the 1920s out of a fascination with the machine's precision and importance in modern life. Percisionism expanded beyond the exploration of machine imagery. Many artists associated with this group gravitated toward Synthetic Cubism's flat, sharply delineated planes as an appropriate visual idiom for their imagery..

American pyramids?:

In My Egypt, Charles Demuth reduced grain elevators to simple geometric forms.

33-36: CHARLES DEMUTH, My Egypt, 1927. Oil on composition board, 2' 11 3/4" x 2' 6". Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney).

The rhythm of city life:

In New York, Night, Georgia O'Keefe reduced skyscrapers to flat planes punctuated by small rectangular windows that add rhythm and energy to the image.

33-37: GEORGIA O'KEEFFE, New York, Night, 1929. Oil on canvas, 3' 4 1/8" x 1' 7 1/8". Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska (Nebraska Art Association, Thomas C. Woods Memorial Collection).

The purity of floral form:

Georgia O'Keeffe's Jack in the Pulpit IV heightens the expressive power of the image by reducing the subject to its purest form and colors.