Edward Weston in Mexico, 1923 Tina Modotti (Italian 1896–1942) was an Italian photographer, model, silent film actress, and leftist activist. Edward Weston in Mexico, 1923 Weston, photo of Modotti taken in Mexico, mid-1920s Still from movie, Frida: dramatizing the Kahlo and Modotti friendship.
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Chapters 4-10 in Ades. Select four modern art works presented in class: one each from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico. Identify artist’s full name, nationality, title, date, and movement . Explain 1) what is “modern” and “avant-garde” about the work in form and content, and 2) what is “Brazilian,” “Argentine,” “Uruguayan,” or “Mexican” about it (or not). Prove you are correct by referring to the expressed intentions of the artists as presented in Ades. 20-minute quiz on Wednesday
Transcript
Chapters 4-10 in Ades.
Select four modern art works presented in class: one each from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Mexico. Identify artist’s full name, nationality, title, date, and movement . Explain 1) what is “modern” and “avant-garde” about the work in form and content, and 2) what is “Brazilian,” “Argentine,” “Uruguayan,” or “Mexican” about it (or not). Prove you are correct by referring to the expressed intentions of the artists as presented in Ades.
20-minute quiz on Wednesday
Tina Modotti (Italian 1896–1942) was an Italian photographer, model, silent film actress, and leftist activist.
Edward Weston in Mexico, 1923
Weston, photo of Modotti taken in Mexico, mid-1920s
Still from movie, Frida: dramatizing the Kahlo and Modotti friendship.
Edward Weston, Nude, 1927, gelatin silver print
Edward Weston, Pepper # 30, 1930. Gsp.
Tina Modotti, Mexico Lily, platinum print, 1925
Rivera, In The Arsenal, fresco detail, 1928 with Tina Modotti on far right
Tina Modotti, Campesinos, 1926; (right) Reading El Machete, 1927
Private Worlds and Public MythsThe “Fantastic” in Latin American Art
Aztec brazier c. 1300 C.E.
European Surrealism Circa 1921 – 1940
"Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.“
- LautréamontLes chants de Maldoror
The Surrealist Revolution (left) Photomontage for La Révolution Surréaliste, nº 12, 1929 by
René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), Enquête sur l'amour’ (Inquiry on Love)(bottom right) Surrealist group, Paris, 1930, L-R: Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, André Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, René Crevel, Man Ray
(left) The World in the Time of the Surrealists, Brussels, 1929
"We are determined to make a Revolution." "We have joined the word surrealism to the word revolution solely to show the
disinterested, detached and even entirely desperate character of this revolution." - André Breton
(right) Easter Island, Polynesia, ceremonial dance paddle (rapa) from André Breton’s collection of Oceanic art. It represents a highly stylized male figure with Janus-face head and phallic finial showing retracted foreskin.
Precursors to Surrealism: 19th Century Romanticism and Symbolism (left) Arnold Bocklin, The Isle of the Dead, 1880, oil on canvas, Symbolism (right) Francisco Goya, Saturn, 1821-1823, fresco remounted on canvas, Romanticism
Surrealist strategies to access the unconscious:(left) Cadavre Exquis, 1926 by Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky). (American, 1890-1976),
Joan Miró. (Spanish, 1893-1983), Max Morise and Yves Tanguy. (American, born France. 1900-1955)
(right) André Masson (French Surrealist), Automatic Drawing, c. 1923
Yves Tanguy (American, b. France,1900-1955), Mama, Papa Is Wounded!, 1927. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 3/4"
Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899-1991), Animals, oil on canvas, 30X40”, 1941, MoMA NYC. Tamayo was a Zapotecan Indian painter born in Oaxaca of Mestizo parents. He spent 1926-29 and 1938-49 in New York City, 1949-59 in Paris, then returned permanently to Oaxaca
Rufino Tamayo, Insomnia, 1958, oil on canvas, 38 ½ x 57”
Tamayo, Woman in Gray, 1959, oil on canvas, 195 X 129.5 cm
Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899-1991), n.d. Man Bird, oil and sand on canvas, 32 x 39 inches
Three Personages, by Rufino Tamayo, a 1970 oil and sand on canvas painting, in an undated image released to the media on Oct. 22, 2007. This painting, stolen 20 years ago, was found in an upper West Side NYC garbage bin and sold for 1$ million. Tamayo’s work has topped around 3$ million.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican 1902-2002)Ladder of Ladders, 1931, silver gelatin print
“The worst thing that you can do is to title a photograph 'Untitled,' because then it has no differentiation from any other picture....” - Bravo
Bravo, Public Thirst, 1934, silver gelatin print, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954) What the Water Yields Me, oil on canvas,1938
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s wedding photograph, 1929. They were twenty years apart in age.
Frida Kahlo, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree), 1936oil and tempera on metal panel, 30.7 x 34.5 cm, MoMA, NYC
Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl in the act of childbirth. Goddess of sexual desire and mother of the corn god.
Kahlo, My Birth, 1932, oil on metal. 31 x 35 cm. Private collection
Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (Detroit), 1932, oil on metal (her first painting on tin), 12 x 15.5 in, with (left) Mexican ex-voto, oil on tin, 1878, 14" x 10“
'The only artist in the history of art who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings.‘ - Rivera
Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States1932, oil on tin, 12 x 13”
Frida Kahlo, Two Fridas, 1939, o/c, 68 x 68”, Museo de Arte Moderno, MCPainted for the 1940 Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City
during her separation and divorce from Diego Rivera
The art of Frida Kahlo-Rivera is a ribbon around a bomb.André Breton
Kahlo, Marxism Will Bring Health to the Sick, 1954, the year of her death.
“I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to come back – Frida” (last entry in diary)
Maria Izquierdo (Mexican, 1906-1955), Self Portrait, 1940(?)
Maria Izquierdo, Adornments, c. 1941, oil on canvas, 70x100cm, Mexico City
María Izquierdo, Red Snapper, 1943, oil on celotex, 61 x 61 cm, Banco Nacional de México collection, Mexico
The Caribbean
Hector Hyppolite (Haitian, 1894-1948) Agoue and his Consort, 1945-8, oil on board, 62 x 77cm. French-African fusion. Agoue is the vodou god of the sea. Hyppolite was a third-generation houngan (vodou priest) and a shoemaker and house painter by trade.
Hector Hyppolite’s Port-au-Prince studio with Agoue and his Consort on the easel, 1946-48. Hyppolite painted with brushes made of chicken feathers and furniture enamel.
Hector Hyppolite, The Great Master, 1946-48, oil on cardboard, 37 x 25 in.
Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), St Francis and the Christ Child, 1946-1948, oil on board, 71.7 56.5 cm., Milwaukee Art Museum
Vodou Altar, Museo Nacional de Guanabacoa
Wifredo Lam (Cuban-born French Painter, 1902-1982) , The Jungle, 1943gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 94 1/4 x 90 1/2“ “. . .beings in passage from a vegetal state to that of an animal still charged with vestiges of the forest” (Lam quoted in Frank, p. 94)
Wifredo Lam in Marseille waiting to escape to the Caribbean from Nazi France, 1940
Lam in Havana studio, 1947
Lam, academic study painted in Madrid, 1925. Lam spent 18 years in Europe (1923-41) before creating his signature paintings in Cuba.
Wifredo Lam, Mother and Child, 1939 (in Paris), gouache on paper, 41 x 29"
(left) Lam, The Casting of the Spell, 1947, oil on burlap, 43 1/8 x 36 in(right) Picasso, Woman in a Chair, 1929
“I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.” (Lam) NEGRITUDE – AIME CESAIRE
Wifredo Lam, The Idol, 1944, oil on canvas, 158 X 127 cm, Caracas
Installation view, 2006, Museum of Modern Art NYCWifredo Lam’s Jungle, 1943
with Louise Bourgeois’s Quarantania, 1948
Leonora Carrington (British-born Mexican Surrealist painter and writer, born in 1917), Self Portrait, 1936. Carrington emigrated to Mexico in 1942 and stayed. See article in
reader (Frank) by Marie-Pierre Colle
Carrington and Max Ernst, France, c. 1940
Roberto Matta Echaurren (Chile, 1911-2002), Invasion of the Night, 1941, oil on canvas, 96 x 152 cm, SFMoMA. An “inscape” in which evocative forms are meant as visual analogies for the artist's psyche.“ Freudian mind space.
Roberto Matta, Psychological Morphology, ca. 1938. Matta emigrated to the New York in 1939-1949 and had a major influence on Abstract Expressionism.
