Ashcan, bellows, stieglitz, o\'keeffe PDF

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Dr. Simon...

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They were not afraid to paint the much rougher aspects of life. 3AM (1909) // The Eight or Ashcan School

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Title is significant in that it tells us a time that women are not usually depicted at. The fact that they are coming home from work at this time tells us that they are prostitutes. The girl in the white dress has a prominent red nose, a clear sign of drunkenness or alcohol. She is also depicted with a cigarette, which was only for very wealthy women or prostitutes. A favorite subject matter for The Eight – film, the new art of cinema. Sloan writes a lot about the importance of film in art. “The Bowery is one of the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied interest, of fun, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk the pages of the Inferno.” – Walt Whitman “A Kosmos, of Manhattan, the son, turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, She is clearly cooking a steak (another word for steak was tenderloin, which was a district in Manhattan where a lot of prostitutes lived).

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Paddy Flanagan (1908) // George Bellows

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His deformed and red ear suggests that he is interested in boxing, despite his age. Also lets us know that he is Irish, by his name. The Ashcan School members were influenced by artists like Frans Hals and Rembrandt, lending to their thick and smooth painting style. Also interested in the idea that art and manhood should be integrated into one. Fascinated with an urban culture of looking and spectacle.

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5 Cents (1907) // John Sloan

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Going to the movies was a very popular pastime and was very cheap, making it accessible to all classes. The movie theater was a place where someone wealthy would be mingled with the less fortunate – suggesting the idea of a true democracy of space. Note the African-American woman, not stereotyped. The clinch – the love scene/kissing scene

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South Beach Bathers (Staten Island) (1907-1908) // Sloan

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Sloan had a fascination with voyeurism. Here he gives us not only him looking, but everyone else looking. Many of the immigrants were allowed to go to this beach.

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Forty-Two Kids (1907) // Bellows

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Bellows was interested in bodies that were seen as even more raunchy and decadent – young men and boys who would gather by the East River. The term “immigrant” was now a derogatory term, no longer referring to the AngloSaxon immigrant, but the Eastern Europeans.

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“sordid” boys “look like maggots” called “river rats” “a tour de force of absurdity” “Scientific studies” proved that “the general criminality of the foreign born is two and one half times that of the native born” Notice how quickly it is painted – it is not as detailed as Eakins’ works. For Bellows, this subject was part of New York and should have been celebrated.

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Both Members of this Club (1909) // Bellows

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Original title was A Nigger and a White Man. In these prize fighting images, Bellows depicted the illegal fights held in Private Gentleman’s Club, Sharkeys. These fights were almost to the death, and the title suggests that even the audience were members of this club who enjoyed viewing this violence. The faces of the audience appear clown-like and grotesque to suggest that they are as involved in this fight as the boxers are. Despite the subject of this work, it was well-received because it depicted an aspect of society that not many people got to see. We know that Bellows referred to Goya’s etchings of bull fighting – a similar subject matter and point to be made. “The artist’s trade is to deal in illimitable experience.” – Bellows

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Excavation at Night (1908) // Bellows

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One of a series of four paintings – a record of this event and feat. Excavation and building of the Pennsylvania Station, 1901-1910. “Grander than the unearthing of the Herculaneum.” Bellows uses a palette knife to suggest the roughness of the effect of the bulldozers – a very visceral painting style.

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Icy Night (1902) // Stieglitz

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Alfred Stieglitz was the most famous photographer. A champion of photographer, not as documentation, but as art; as equal to sculpture and equal to painting. Photographing “in relationship to the new America in the making” He and his art photography friends were of the first to photograph the city at night. Footsteps can be seen in the snow – not an unblemished place, but a place that has been experienced. His aim was to capture the moment.

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The Flat Iron Building (1902-1903) // Stieglitz

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Fuller/ Flatiron Building designed by Daniel Burnham (1901-1902), 22 stories, tallest building of the day. Interestingly, the tree has the same shape as the building. Softness of the photograph – pictorialism: For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination. When comparing to the negative, we see that he has radically cropped the other trees out to create direct competition between the Flat Iron and nature. “I finally saw the Flatiron Building as I had never seen it before. It appeared to me to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean liner – a picture of the new America still in the making.” –Stieglitz “What is of greatest importance is to hold a moment, to record something so completely that those who see it will relive an equivalent of what has been experienced.” – Stieglitz Critics called Stieglitz’s photo: “frugalness sublime” “monstrous shape soars in massive flight”

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Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Battersea Bridge (1872) and a print by Hiroshige, have similar compositional elements.

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The Steerage (1907) // Stieglitz

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In 1907, the beginning of “straight photography” “The moment dictates for me what I must do, I have no theory about what the moment should bring…I simply react to the moment…I am the moment.” – Stieglitz It is not a photograph of immigrants arriving in New York City – it is not. It is the immigrants leaving America. What struck him about this was all the shapes – the straw hat, the triangle, the stripes, the x on the man’s suspenders. They were all shapes to him. “…the feeling of ship, ocean, sky; a sense of release that I was away from the mob called ‘rich.’ Rembrandt came into my mind and I wondered would he felt as I did.” – Stieglitz Rembrandt image = Hundred Gilder Print (Christ Healing the Sick) (1646-49) – the idea of the common people being very important to him.

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Georgia O’Keeffe, A Portrait June 4, 1917 (*) // Stieglitz

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Over 20 years. Shows her as the modern woman. The triangle of the shirt refers to femininity. Leads to a love affair and marriage.

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Georgia O’Keeffe, A Portrait (1918) // Stieglitz O’Keeffe as Androgyne (1920) // Stieglitz

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O’Keeffe as Japonaise (left); O’Keeffe as “a purer form of myself” “bigger than most women” -- Stieglitz “Georgia is a wonder…If ever there is a whiteness she is that.” – Stieglitz

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Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait (1917) // Stieglitz Georgia O’Keeffe: Hands on Skull (1930) // Stieglitz

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“The chief thing that interests me is to see the perfectly natural unfolding of the so-called inner-self” – Stieglitz “What she is within herself…becomes visible to her in external objects.” – Paul Rosenfield on O’Keeffe Mudra gestures – a symbolic or ritual gesture in Hinduism and Buddhism; an energetic seal of authenticity employed in the iconography and spiritual practice of Indian religions. Skulls, to O’Keeffe, were the cycle – not just life and death

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Early No. 2 (1915)

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Early abstract drawings; big strong strokes, very fetus-like and also very phallic. “I make them to just express myself – things I feel and want to say and haven’t words for” – O’Keeffe on her abstractions of 1915-1919

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Blue I (1916) // O’Keeffe // watercolor

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Kandinsky was very influential to her (Improvisation #27 (Garden of Love), 1912). The idea of color and an Eden-like world. Blue = spiritual/mystical color, yellow = spiritual/intellectual Synesthesia – seeing colors when hearing sounds Élan vital – the vital force or impulse of life, especially; a creative principle held by French philosopher Bergson to be immanent in all organisms and responsible for evolution. Theosophy – a collection of mystical and occultist philosophies concerning, or seeking direct knowledge of, the presumed mysteries of life and nature, particularly of the nature of divinity and the origin and purpose of the universe

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Closed, Slightly Open, Inside Clam Shell (1926) // O’Keeffe

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“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” – O’Keeffe (simplifying from realism) “The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.” – O’Keeffe Clam shells look like a whole landscape – micro-macrocosms

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Radiator Building at Night, NY (1927) // O’Keeffe

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One of a series on skyscrapers of NYC. She abstracts it. She puts Alfred Stieglitz’s name in neon lights, the white smoke on the right looks like a profile (self-portrait; rethinks portraiture as well).

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Cow’s Skull Red, White and Blue (1931) // O’Keeffe

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Gives us the skull against red, white, and blue. The idea of the West & America going from one side of the coast to the other. “Why not the Great American Painting?” – O’Keeffe “One cannot be an America by going about saying one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, live America, love America, and then work.” – O’Keeffe

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