Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [121]
Wood, “American Gothic,” 1930, Art Institute of Chicago. American Scene painters like Wood portrayed simple country folk in a realistic style.
SOCIAL REALISM. With one quarter of the labor force unemployed, banks bankrupt, and the Midwest Bread Basket turned into a Dust Bowl, the Depression-era United States was on the skids. A group of artists like Ben Shahn, Reginald Marsh, and Jacob Lawrence used art to highlight injustice and motivate reform. In Mexico and the U.S., Latino artists (José Orozco, David Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera — see p. 21) produced vast murals celebrating the working class. Deeply committed to social change, these painters attacked evils of capitalism in a semi-realistic style that exaggerated features, color, and scale for emotional impact.
AMERICA’S GREATEST BLACK ARTIST
ROMARE BEARDEN (1912- 1988) began as a Social Realist in Harlem during the 1930s. Aspiring, he said, “to paint the life of my people as I know it,”he portrayed card games on the street and children taking piano lessons in New York as well as roosters, washtubs, and voodoo women from his North Carolina childhood. In 1964 he found his mature style: photocollage. Picasso had told him in the 1950s, “You’ve got to tell a lie to get to a stronger truth. ” Bearden began to express the collective history of the African-American experience through a patchwork of photographed figures. The combined snippets create a jazzy hybrid larger than its parts.
Bearden, “The Woodshed,” 1970, MMA, NY.
SOCIAL PROTEST ART
Although Hogarth originated the form, socially conscious paintings were few before the nineteenth century. Artists were generally interested in grander themes and besides, political statements didn’t look good hanging on the wall. Some who challenged the status quo were:
FRANCISCO GOYA, scathingly denounced man’s follies in paintings like “The Third of May, 1808,” part of a series entitled The Disasters of War.
HONORE DAUMIER, in “Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834,” portrayed a heap of civilian bodies executed by state troops. Here he implies the deadening effect of Machine Age transportation.
JACOB RIIS, a pioneering photojournalist, exposed scandalous conditions like homelessness among immigrants.
PABLO PICASSO, attacked the destructiveness and cruelty of war in works like “Guernica.”
DIEGO RIVERA, portrayed an executed Mexican peasant as Christ being taken from the cross.
DOROTHEA LANGE,
highlighted poverty among the dispossessed during the Depression.
ANSELM
KIEFER, used fiery imagery to protest the horror of the Holocaust.
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
With Abstract Expressionism, for the first time, the metacenter of what was happening in world art shifted to American shores. And a “happening” is largely what Abstract Expressionism was all about, encompassing as “art” not just the product of artistic creation but the active process of creating it.
Also called “action painting” and the New York School, Abstract Expressionism stressed energy, action, kineticism, and freneticism. It used much of what had been defined as art as little more than a point of departure. Indeed, Abstract Expressionism is to conventional artistic technique what jazz is to 4/4 time. While one might look at a painting of Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline and say, “I don’t get it,” that would be like criticizing jazz great Charlie Parker for not following a tune.
Abstract Expressionism began to take form in the late 1940s and early ’50s partially as a reaction to a war that devastated two continents, destroyed 16 million people, and left in its wake a world out of whack. When the Surrealists arrived in America during World War II, the new generation of American painters discovered from them the art of anarchy. But where Dada and Surrealism revolted against logic, the Americans took “automatism” one step further, relying on instinct to shape works of art that were not only irrational but were, at their core, unpremeditated accidents.
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
PERIOD: Late 1940s, early ’50s