Stieglitz, Alfred (1864–1946)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert R. Hartel Jr.
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Alfred Stieglitz ◽  
City College ◽  
Technical Manual ◽  
The Usa ◽  
German Jewish

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an American art collector, dealer and photographer who was one of the earliest supporters of modernist art in the United States. Stieglitz was born in 1865 in Hoboken, New Jersey, to an affluent German-Jewish family. He studied at City College in New York for two years and then at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin for three years, before returning to New York. Although trained in engineering, Stieglitz became interested in photography while in Germany. He promoted photography as a legitimate form of art and expression, which was a radical idea at the time. This led him to establish, in 1902, the Photo-Secession, a group of photographers who believed that photography needed to be considered a fine art and not a technical, manual craft. In 1903 Steiglitz started Camera Work, his own publication on modern art, which he published until 1917. Camera Work published photographs, reproductions of modernist artworks, and essays, treatises, statements and criticism about modernist art and theory. In 1904, Stieglitz opened his first gallery, the ‘‘Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession’’ (later known as ‘‘291’’ for its address on Fifth Avenue), where he introduced the European avant-garde to the USA. He donated works for the Armory Show in New York in 1913 and also purchased works from the exhibition.

de Zayas, Marius (1880–1961)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabiola Martinez-Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Aesthetic

Marius de Zayas was a Mexican caricaturist, writer, collector, dealer, and curator who formed part of the New York avant-garde, and did much to promote European modernism in the United States. Through his writings, curatorial, and creative work, de Zayas helped to lay the foundations of American modernism, and to assert the centrality of primitive art to the modernist aesthetic. Exhibited for the first time in 1913, de Zayas’ abstract portraits are some of the earliest examples of avant-garde production the United States. These drawings reflect his engagement with the aesthetic explorations of the European avant-gardes, and the challenges posed by photography to the tradition of Naturalism in Western art. Marius de Zayas’ work was instrumental in promoting a transnational exchange of art and ideas between Europe and the Americas. In his conception of modernism, primitive art was the source of formal experimentation, but also of spirituality and transcendence. His contribution to the history of modern art in the United States remains to be appropriately acknowledged, but it is there for anyone who cares to read his How, When and Why Modern Art Came to New York written for Alfred Barr towards the end of his life.

Levy, Julien (1906–1981)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Stein
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Salvador Dali ◽  
Frida Kahlo ◽  
Alfred Stieglitz ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Joseph Cornell

New York-based art collector and gallerist, Julien Levy, was an important advocate for photography as a modern art medium in the 1930s and 1940s, and was instrumental in introducing the surrealist movement to New York. Levy studied at Harvard University in the mid-1920s, where his teachers included future tastemakers A. Everett ("Chick") Austin and Alfred Barr Jr. In 1926, Levy befriended Marcel Duchamp, with whom he traveled to Europe, circulating among the artistic avant-garde. Relationships with Man Ray, Mina Loy, Berenice Abbott, and others encouraged Levy’s activities as a collector and shaped the experimental spirit of the Julien Levy Gallery, which opened in New York in 1931. In the decade prior to the founding of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, Levy mounted exhibitions addressing the history of the medium and arguing for the avant-garde photography of the moment, much as Alfred Stieglitz had done in the 1910s and 1920s. More broadly, the Levy Gallery was an important—in some cases first—American venue for Surrealist-influenced artists including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Arshile Gorky, Clarence John Laughlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Joseph Cornell.

Reconstructing Cold War Cultural Diplomacy Exhibitions

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer McComas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The United States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Degenerate Art ◽  
Armory Show

As museum and exhibition histories have become significant subjects of art historical investigation in recent decades, museums themselves have subjected some of the most groundbreaking and controversial exhibitions of the twentieth century to reevaluation through elaborate reconstructions. These restaged exhibitions can shed new light on the shifting boundaries of the canon, question long-accepted art historical interpretations, and provide insight into the intersection of art and politics. Restaged exhibitions, however, are not simply exercises in historical research, but often serve as commentary on contemporary issues. A relevant example is the 1991–1992 exhibition ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, a reconstruction of the 1937 Nazi propaganda exhibition Degenerate Art.[1] Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the restaged exhibition introduced late-twentieth-century American audiences to the cultural censorship practiced by the Third Reich at a time when the withholding of federal funding for controversial art was being hotly debated in the United States.[2] It also helped to revive interest in the issue of Nazi art looting, which is now a major subject of research within European and North American museums. Reconstructed exhibitions also focus attention on how and why certain art forms have become canonical. This was the case with the New-York Historical Society’s 2013 exhibition The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution, a partial reconstruction of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art.[3] Better known as the Armory Show, this exhibition, held in New York City in February and March 1913, is lauded for introducing European avant-garde art to American audiences and setting the stage for its eventual entry into the canon in the United States. The majority of critics in 1913, however, condemned the Armory Show, perceiving the fauvist and cubist works on display as anarchic, ugly, and even immoral. Revisiting the exhibition a century later allowed for reflection on our changing artistic preferences as new forms of art transition from shock-inducing to canonical. As Ken Johnson of the New York Times noted in his exhibition review of October 10, 2013, “now that the Cubists and the Fauves are museum-certified old masters, it takes some imagination to comprehend what made the Armory Show such a controversial sensation.”

scholarly journals Aleksandr Deineka’s Works in the Context of the Art Deco Style

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 168-175
Author(s):  
A. S. Dobrydneva
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Art ◽  
Metro Station ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Art Deco ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Road ◽  
Mount Vernon ◽  
Soviet Art ◽  
The Usa

This paper analyzes the founding bases of comparisons between the Aleksandr Deineka’s artistic works and the art deco, the connection between Deineka’s works and European and American art of the 1930s Deineka’s early works refer to the avant-garde and the late ones are usually related to socialist realism. The novel artistic language is the most important link between the Soviet art and the art deco style, making the artist its most prominent USSR proponent. In this respect, the key event is the artist’s trip to the USA, France and Italy in 1935. What made Deineka engage in the intercultural discussion on artistic styles were industrial, urban, mundane and sport themes the Soviet art and art deco (mostly American) shared. A dialogue with the US Skyscraper style influenced a series of paintings and sketches, including New York. Central Park, The Road to Mount Vernon, Baseball, The Boredom. The Soviet experience contributed to Deineka’s few American works. In the most clear and general manner the art deco ideas and practical solutions were incorporated in the 1938 project of Deineka – in the decoration of the Mayakovskaya metro station, Moscow. The idea was to create a series of allegoric and technically new mosaic plafonds. Both spirit and techniques of late Deineka were partly inspired by the American art deco.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

scholarly journals »Heimat im Koffer.« – »Oder über das Emigrantendasein. (Falls nicht zu traurig).«

Aschkenas ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schlör
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThe idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.

Politics in the Art of War: The American War Cemeteries

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-254
Author(s):  
Kate Clarke Lemay
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Of War ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
Internal Struggle

The overseas American war cemeteries, in their aim to achieve “soft power” or cultural diplomacy during the mid-century, created high-value commissions in the American art world. The sought-after commissions resulted in an internal struggle between artists practicing traditional figural Classicism and the avant-garde who had adopted expressionism and abstraction. Additionally, a surging political stream of anti-Communism made artists vulnerable, because modern art seemed to underscore Communism’s abandonment of religion. By adopting demagoguery as political strategy, McCarthyists escalated the perception of Communism as present in the United States by targeting American culture, including artists of the American war cemeteries. Describing the struggles surrounding the creation of the cemeteries, this essay takes into account the artists’ biographies, statements, and actions, arguing that their art-making was not only critical in creating international diplomacy, but also in sustaining American freedom, particularly within an era of American political suspicion.

Exhibition 58: Modern Architecture in England, Museum of Modern Art, 1937

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 277-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Powers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Multiple Sequence ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
New Yorkers

Exhibition 58: Modern Architecture in England, held between 10 February and 7 March 1937 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), was a notable event. Amidst claims that ‘England leads the world in modern architectural activity’, the exhibition ‘amazed New Yorkers’ and equally surprised English commentators. However, it has not subsequently received any extended investigation. The present purpose is to look at it as a multiple sequence of events, involving other exhibitions, associated publications and the trajectories of individuals and institutions, through which tensions came to the surface about the definition and direction of Modernism in England and elsewhere. Such an analysis throws new light on issues such as the motives for staging the exhibition, the personnel involved and associated questions relating to the role of émigré architects in Britain and the USA, some of which have been misinterpreted in recent commentaries.Hitchcock's unequivocal claim for the importance of English Modernism at this point still arouses disbelief, and raises a question whether it can be accepted at face value or requires explaining in terms of some other hidden intention.

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