Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [107]
Tatlin’s rival, Malevich (pronounced MAL uh vich; 1878-1935), also pioneered abstract geometric art. His squares floating on a white background and finally his white-on-white paintings simplified art more radically than ever before. Malevich wanted “to free art from the burden of the object.” He tried to make his shapes and colors as pure as musical notes, without reference to any recognizable object. Popova (1889-1924) added glowing color to Analytic Cubism.
These artists believed they could build a technological utopia through their designs. But around 1924 the dream ended brutally. The Communist Party declared art must be functional, an art for the masses, preferably propagandistic. Stalin sent nonconforming artists to labor camps and locked away their Modernist works in cellars. The flowering of Russian invention and optimism lasted only a brief “Prague spring.”
PRECISIONISM: MODERNISM IN AMERICA.
In 1907 when Picasso was effectively burying the Renaissance with “Les Desmoiselles d‘Avignon,” American art was planted solidly in the past. Only a group of painters known as The Eight, or the Ashcan School (see p. 154) dared shake up convention by portraying real-life subjects of the Big City rather than maidens on unicorns in moonlight. Another group of American artists, the Precisionists, was concerned not just with new subject matter like the Ashcan School but with new attitudes toward form. The leading figures of this movement, which flourished in the 1920s, were the painters Charles Sheeler (1883- 1965), Charles Demuth (1883-1935), and Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986).
The Precisionists straddled the borderline between representation and abstraction. They simplified forms to an extreme of spare geometry, using clean-edged rectangles to indicate soaring skyscrapers and factories. Sheeler’s “River Rouge Plant” praises the severe, engineered beauty of an automobile factory, while Demuth’s “My Egypt” portrays grain elevators with the epic grandeur of ancient pyramids.
0’KEEFFE: AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL. One of the most free-thinking artists to bring American art out of its cultural backwater and into the Modernist mainstream was Georgia O‘Keeffe. “I decided that I wasn’t going to spend my life doing what had already been done,” she said and proceeded to do what no one had done before. O’Keeffe is best known for her huge blowups of single flowers like irises and calla lilies. O‘Keeffe told why she magnified flowers: “Nobody has seen a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time.... I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it.” O’Keeffe evoked nature without explicitly describing it and approached the brink of abstraction. “I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way — things that I had no words for,” she said in 1923.
Six years later, entranced by bare desert landscapes, O‘Keeffe went to New Mexico. She painted outdoors, day and night, sleeping in a tent and wearing gloves to work on frigid days. Sometimes the wind raged so fiercely it blew the coffee out of her cup and swept away her easel. She specialized in broad, simple forms to portray red sunsets, black rocks, and rippling cliffs. In the West O’Keeffe further pared down her art, literally to the bare bones, in a series of skull and pelvic bone pictures. Her bleached-bone paintings portray austere, curvilinear forms to express, she said, “the wideness and wonder of the world.”
In her nineties, despite failing eyesight, O‘Keeffe tackled a new art form: pottery. At 90 she explained her success: “It takes more than talent. It takes a kind of nerve ... a kind of nerve and a lot of hard, hard work.”
STIEGLITZ AND O’KEEFFE
In 1916, Alfred Stieglitz was a famous New York photographer whose Photo-Secession Gallery (also called 291 after its Fifth Avenue address) was