DYN (1942–1945)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Winter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Native American Art ◽  
Henry Miller ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Anais Nin

In Mexico City, at the height of World War II, the Viennese expatriate artist Wolfgang Paalen founded and edited DYN, an international art journal that distinguished him as a theorist and scholar of modern and ethnographic art. The journal was instrumental in the development of avant-garde art in Mexico and New York, particularly Abstract Expressionism. In DYN, Paalen published his own essays, criticism, and poetry, and collections of Native American Art, along with the contributions of Latin American artists such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Miguel Covarrubias, César Moro, Carlos Mérida, Martín Chambi, and Roberto Matta; European artists Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Alice Rahon; New York artists Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and William Baziotes; Mexican anthropologists and ethnologists Alfonso Caso, Miguel Angel Fernandez, and Carlos Margain Araujo; and writers Valentine Penrose, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin. The five issues of DYN published between 1942 and 1944 inspired artists and thinkers worldwide. In 1945, following Paalen’s one-man exhibitions in Mexico City and New York, Robert Motherwell edited Form and Sense, an anthology of the DYN essays.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosina Lozano
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Bilingual Education ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Spanish ◽  
Education Act

This epilogue briefly identifies some of the major changes in Spanish language politics since World War II. These include community shifts in activism. For example, the Chicano Movementreclaimed the language and advocated for culturally affirming bilingual education programs. The epilogue also turns to federal support for Spanish instruction with the 1968 Bilingual Education Act and with the 1975 extension to the Voting Rights Act that provides federal protection for ballots in languages other than English. Spanish is no longer a language of just the Southwest and there are major populations of Spanish speakers in cities like Chicago, New York, and Miami today. In 2013, tens of millions of U.S. residents spoke Spanish in their homes. Spanish language perseverance in the United States is due to a long history of Latin American migration to the country. It began as a language of settlement and power in the nineteenth century and has transformed into a language often deemed as foreign or un-American. Spanish is an American language historically and this book has recovered that history.

Carrington, Leonora (1917–2011)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Caplow
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
World War

Leonora Carrington was a painter, sculptor, poet and novelist who drew on mythology, fantasy and the occult to create images of a dreamlike world. She grew up in a wealthy family in England, educated by governesses, and was deeply influenced by the fairy tales her Irish nanny told her. Her parents sent her to convent schools, and although they expected her to become a socialite, they allowed her to attend Mrs. Penrose’s Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. Once back in London in 1936, Carrington enrolled in Amédée Ozenfant’s Academy of Fine Arts. She attended the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and was impressed by the work of Max Ernst, whom she met the following year. Carrington moved to France in 1937 to be with Ernst and joined the Surrealist circle in Paris; however, the two of them were separated at the beginning of World War II, and Carrington made her way to Mexico City, where she joined a group of exiled Surrealists. She based her Self Portrait of 1938 on Celtic myths, and after moving to Mexico, she included Pre-Columbian imagery in many of her works. In later years she divided her time between New York and Mexico City. She received the Order of the British Empire in 2000.

Rothko, Mark (1903-1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hodge
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Native American ◽  
American Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
New York School ◽  
Native American Art ◽  
Metropolitan Museum Of Art ◽  
Four Seasons ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko is one of the most celebrated painters from a group that matured in the US of the 1940s, later dubbed ‘The New York School’. His work became increasingly famous in the US and Europe during the 1950s, and his status was solidified by a large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962. Rothko began his career as a figurative painter. From 1938, he produced an innovative style that drew on Surrealism and incorporated disparate sources from ancient Greek and Native American art to Biblical imagery. After 1945 his paintings became increasingly abstract, moving towards the style that he is most associated with today. These works involve soft, cloud-like rectangles of colour, painted in multiple layers, which produce the appearance of glowing, shimmering light. Rothko had an uneasy relationship with art critics, collectors, and institutions. In 1950, he was amongst a group known as ‘The Irascibles’, who protested that a juried exhibition of contemporary works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was hostile to ‘advanced art.’ In 1958, he reneged on a major commission to produce murals for the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, deciding that its atmosphere was inappropriate.

Lassaw, Ibram (1913–2003)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther T. Thyssen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
New York School ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
The Family ◽  
Galactic Cluster ◽  
Brooklyn Museum

A sculptor of the New York School, Ibram Lassaw was born to Russian parents in Alexandria, Egypt. The family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY, in 1921, where Lassaw learned modeling, casting, and carving. He discovered avant-garde art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, and continued to study sculpture at the Clay Club from 1927 to 1932. An active participant in New York modernist circles, Lassaw was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group (1935), and The Club (1949). Lassaw’s interest in cosmic and religious themes culminated in abstract sculptures for Jewish synagogues, such as Pillar of Fire (1953) at Temple Beth El, Springfield, MA. Known for his web-like structures, Lassaw dripped, fused, and spattered metal, embracing the resulting accidental contours that accrued on his gridded designs, as in Galactic Cluster #1 (1958, Newark Museum). He wielded the oxyacetylene torch like a paintbrush and the intricately structured wires twist, turn, and redouble like skeins of paint by Jackson Pollock. His work was included in the 1959 Kassel Documenta, which showcased American Abstract Expressionism.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Piekut
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
The Social

This chapter discusses how a US-focused mainstream concept of American experimental music within the art music tradition was cemented in the 1950s through the work of John Cage at a moment when he established professional connections with the European avant-garde. The chapter recognizes that before this moment, composers such as Henry Cowell had thought of American experimentalism in a more hemispheric way and included the activities of composers like Carlos Chávez, Alejandro García Caturla, and Amadeo Roldán in their genealogies. Rather than arguing for a revisionist type of history to include Latin Americans in these narratives about American experimental music, the chapter’s goal is to show that taking into account historical and contemporary Latin@ and Latin American understandings of experimentalisms not only may help us in redefining the social and political meaning of what has been constructed as mainstream musical experimentalism but also may play a central role in critically rethinking post–World War II narratives about music.

Here and There in a World of Turmoil, October 1937 to October 1939

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War

This chapter covers the return of La Meri and Carreras to the United States and their work in New York, including La Meri’s first totally “ethnic” dance concert. Then it discusses their next Latin American tour (February to August, 1938), some months in Italy, engagements in London, a United States tour (February to April, 1939), and their third and last Latin American tour. As World War II was beginning, they abruptly had to sail back to the United States. Of course, that disaster made it unfeasible to return to Italy, so they settled in New York—the best choice at the time.

Shaken into Seeing and Hearing

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-170
Author(s):  
Ryan Dohoney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

Chapter 3 chronicles the intersection of Feldman’s and Dominique de Menil’s spiritual aesthetics. It begins by reconstructing the conditions of their first meeting: the New York City Ballet’s 1966 performance of Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace, re-choreographed for George Balanchine. It goes on to document Feldman and de Menil’s 1967 collaboration on the gallery show Six Painters at the University of St. Thomas. Through her family’s patronage, as well as Dominique’s presence as self-installed head of the art department, the University became a major presenting organization offering avant-garde cultural events in the city. Six Painters featured paintings by Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline. Feldman was also given a residency at the university in 1967, where he lectured on abstract expressionism and his own musical aesthetics as well as presented a concert of his music.

scholarly journals Sá, Lúcia. Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and São Paulo. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Larkosh
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Rain Forest ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
The Other ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Mario De Andrade

At the start of her latest book, Lúcia Sá explains the intellectual trajectory that led her to a study of the Latin American megacities of Mexico City and São Paulo by way of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma: “in order to recover his muiraquitã, the eponymous Mário de Andrade traveled from one end of Brazil to the other, the Amazon to São Paulo, and in a sense, having completed Rain Forest Literatures (2004), this is what I have attempted to do in this study” (x). Such a work, following one on the literatures of the Amazon, underscores Sá’s admirable commitment to exploring the literary and cultural extremes of her native Brazil, while at the same time incorporating other materials that make a more comparative discussion with internal indigenous cultural elements or other Latin American societies possible.

Consumption as Assimilation: New York Times Reporting on Native American Art and Commodities, 1950–1970

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 972-996
Author(s):  
REETTA HUMALAJOKI
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Native American ◽  
New York Times ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Native American Art ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Art Collectors

The appropriation of Indigenous cultures has sparked multiple controversies in the United States over the past decade. This phenomenon is not new, however. This article examines New York Times reporting on Native American art and commodities to demonstrate how trends in consuming “Indian” products contributed to the assimilationist federal Indian policy of termination, between 1950 and 1970. In this period the consumption of items perceived as “Indian” shifted from an elite art collectors’ activity to a widespread fashion trend. Nevertheless, Times reporting shows that throughout this era shopping for “Indian” items subsumed Indigenous cultures into the imagined unity of a national American identity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document