Man Ray (1890-1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Donkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
Artistic Career ◽  
Second World

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, Man Ray was one of the key innovators in modernist photography, film, and object making. He began his artistic career as a painter, and while his interest in the medium endured, it was photography that brought him financial and critical success. In New York, Man Ray was introduced to the avant-garde while visiting Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and the Armory Show (1913). He met Marcel Duchamp in 1915 and, along with Picabia, the three men founded New York Dada. In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris where he continued to produce experimental and provocative works, and was associated with the Paris dada group. Man Ray developed a lucrative portrait and fashion photography business, photographing cultural giants such as James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, earning him commissions from magazines such as Vogue. From 1924 photographic images became central in surrealist publications, and Man Ray’s intensely innovative approach was highly regarded by the founder of the group, André Breton. Man Ray developed a poetic that demonstrated the union of reality and imagination; he used found images, documentary images, film stills, and straight and experimental photography, including solarisation (a process he developed with Lee Miller). The Second World War forced him to leave Paris for the US, but he returned in 1951, where he resided until his death.

Arensberg, Walter (1878–1954)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Archino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early American ◽  
Large Glass ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Constantin Brancusi

Walter Arensberg (April 4, 1878 to January 29, 1954) and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg (1879–1953), were influential patrons of the avant-garde, building a collection that included modernist art, early American Shaker furniture, and non-Western objects, primarily of African and pre-Columbian origin. They collected modern art by American and European artists, with a special concentration in work by Marcel Duchamp (who also served as their art advisor) and Constantin Brancusi. Their New York apartment, at 33 West 67th Street, hosted a frequent salon of artists, writers, and intellectuals from 1915–1921. These gatherings were a focal point for the activities and antics of New York Dada. Among Arensberg’s many friendships with artists and writers, his long association with Marcel Duchamp was perhaps most influential. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Walter Pach met him at the pier and brought him directly to the Arensberg’s apartment, where Duchamp lived during the summer of 1915. Later, Arensberg paid the rent for Duchamp’s studio, located in the same building. The Arensberg Collection would amass nearly forty works by Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1921). When Arensberg was unable to purchase the artist’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), he commissioned a duplicate and eventually acquired the original as well.

Wood, Beatrice (1893–1998)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thelma Rohrer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
York City ◽  
Smithsonian Institution ◽  
Native State ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Artist ◽  
New York Dada

An American potter known for luster-glaze chalices and whimsical ceramic figures, Beatrice Wood was once named the "Mama of Dada." Born on 3 March 1893 into a wealthy family in San Francisco, California, raised in New York City, and a student at the Académie Julian in Paris, Wood rebelled from her traditional upbringing by 1912. Seeking a more bohemian life, she joined avant-garde art circles, became friends with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché, and was influential in the New York Dada movement. During the 1930s, her early successes in ceramics provided independent income and, by 1948, she settled in Ojai, California, to continue her interest in theosophy. She established a studio developing embedded luster glazes with radiant colors and continued this work for over thirty years. Wood was recognized as a "California Living Treasure" by her native state, named an "Esteemed American Artist" by the Smithsonian Institution, and partly inspired the character "Rose" in the 1997 film Titanic. She died on 12 March 1998 at the age of 105.

Picabia, Francis (1879–1953)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Chadwick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual Vocabulary ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Machine Parts ◽  
Francis Picabia ◽  
Blind Faith ◽  
Armory Show

A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing to Dada in Zurich and Barcelona. Picabia was a car enthusiast who embraced modernity, viewing the machine as a form expressive of the modern spirit from which he drew a new and revolutionary artistic idiom. Picabia also drew upon the tenets of the Puteaux Group and, upon arriving in New York to exhibit at the Armory Show in 1913, was lauded as a leading Cubist. He worked for a time in Orphic Cubism, a blend of Cubist, Futurist, and Fauvist themes and techniques to which he added ‘‘abstracted’’ industrial and biomorphic forms. Although he maintained an interest in the figure, Picabia is known primarily for his early dialogue with abstraction and his development of a quasi-machine aesthetic. He looked to industrial diagrams for artistic inspiration and, upon returning to New York in 1915, during a period of involvement with photographer and modern arts patron Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 Gallery and journal, produced the famous Mechanomorph series. Depicting Stieglitz and his entourage as bizarre, seemingly dysfunctional, industrial forms, Picabia’s Mechanomorphs shaped the visual vocabulary of New York, and later Paris, Dada. Picabia’s ironic stance in relation to art and culture has prompted scholars to interpret his conflation of human and machine parts as also playful punning of morality, sexuality, and blind faith in technology.

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.

'I chose the values I regarded as American': sexuality, ethnicity, and FBI informant Angela Calomiris

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (20) ◽  
pp. 109-135
Author(s):  
Veronica A. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Later Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Second World

For personal or political reasons undocumented and controversial to this day, Greenwich Village lesbian photographer Angela Calomiris joined forces with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the Second World War to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). As Calomiris rose through CPUSA ranks in New York City, espionage efforts resulted in the Attorney General's office declaring the avant-garde Film and Photo League to be a subversive communist organisation in 1947, and the conviction of communist leaders during the Smith Act trial two years later. Interestingly, despite J. Edgar Hoover's indeterminate sexuality and well-documented harassment of gays and lesbians in public life, what mattered to him was not whether Calomiris adhered to heteronormativity, but that her ultimate sense of duty lay with the US government. This article demonstrates how this distinction helped Calomiris find personal satisfaction in defiance of patriarchal conservative expectations and heteronormative cold war gender roles. This article, which utilises FBI files, press coverage, some of Calomiris's papers and her memoir, concludes with a brief discussion of Calomiris's later life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she continued to craft her identity as a left-liberal feminist, with no mention of the service to the FBI or her role in fomenting the second Red Scare.

Readymades

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Child
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jasper Johns ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Bicycle Wheel

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avant-garde. It was during this period that Duchamp’s account of the function of the readymade was consolidated into the now common understanding, which is that "readymade" constitutes an object chosen by an artist and declared to be art.

scholarly journals The Mama of Dada: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the original mastermind behind Fountain, 1917

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Schartner ◽  
Fran Bidwell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art History ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
Art World ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
German American ◽  
To Come ◽  
Contemporary Artist

The most disruptive sculpture that broke the art world and the notion of art itself; the notorious Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp changed art history forever. Since the anonymous submission to the salon of independent artists in New York 1917, art lovers have never been able to come to a consensus about the piece. Debates and disputes polarized the opinion of the public. As a result, the name Duchamp had become synonymous with the term Readymade, Dada and the avant-garde. Absurdly, sufficient evidence suggests that the French artist Duchamp was not the artist behind Fountain. The female Dada poet and German American contemporary artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, was the mastermind behind it. 

Assemblage

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Pantazis
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
Joseph Cornell

Assemblage is an artistic form that involves the transformation of non-art objects into two-dimensional or three-dimensional artistic compositions. Together with abstraction, it has been considered one of the two most significant innovations of modern art. The term assemblage was first used in 1953 by critic, philosopher and poet Max Loreau in describing French artist Jean Dubuffet’s series of imprint collages of butterflies’ wings. The term was popularized by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, which showcased the work of early 20th-century European artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Kurt Schwitters, and Americans such as Joseph Cornell, Man Ray and Robert Rauschenberg.

David Roland Smith (1906–1965)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther T. Thyssen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
New York School ◽  
Works Progress Administration ◽  
American Industry ◽  
Iron And Steel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Car Accident ◽  
Wartime Experience ◽  
European Modernism

David Smith was the pre-eminent sculptor of the New York School. Best known for his iron and steel constructions, Smith created cohesive sets of sculptures, each organized around a particular system of forms, metaphors, and methods. He studied painting in New York with Czech modernist Jan Matulka (1890–1972), and later worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sculpture division (1939). He learned most about the European avant-garde from the émigré intellectual John Graham (1886–1961), originally a friend of Smith’s wife Dorothy Dehner (American sculptor 1901–1994). Through Graham’s introductions, the couple met avant-garde artists in Europe during their travels there in 1935–1936. Smith considered the constructions of Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso the forebears of his oeuvre. Smith sculpted found metal with the oxyacetylene torch and welded the cut shapes together. Planar parts are joined at angles to entrap space, or layered thinly to slice through space rather than to displace it. From the mid-1950s until his death in a car accident in 1965, Smith’s output was prolific and monumental, his process driven by his wartime experience as a machinist and metals fabricator. Smith defined a new status for American sculpture with origins in European modernism and American industry and production, and by the critical validation his oeuvre attained.

Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-117
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Alfred Stieglitz ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Technological Sublime ◽  
Lewis Mumford ◽  
First Time

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it argues that these vanguardists emphasised their delicacy, intricacy and fragility. Sections one and two detail the divergent aesthetics of two key modernist formations: the technological sublime of Alfred Stieglitz and his ‘Young American’ literary acolytes (including Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford); and the techno-bathetic proto-Dadaists of the magazine 291, exemplified by Francis Picabia. The third section analyses the techno-bathetic practices of Marcel Duchamp in his New York Dada phase, as well as crucial responses to that work by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. The fourth section focuses on the work of the Baroness, who interrogated the implications of socio-technics for problems of sex, gender and nationality. Finally, section five focuses on Loy’s poetry, fashion designs, inventions, and technicities; for the first time, it unveils her invention ‘verrovoile’, a translucent thermoplastic she profiled in a previously unknown 1929 newspaper article. The chapter argues that, through her poetry and inventions, Loy helped introduce the concept of the artist-engineer to transatlantic discourse in the mid-1920s.

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