The role of Paris in the development of American Painting:
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The pivotal women who painted, collected, supported, and curated American Art.
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Why the author believes that Jackson Pollock is the first true American master painter:
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Why the author believes that Jackson Pollock is the first true American master painter:
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An Interactive Tour through a few of the Museums discussed in Painting American
PARIS
Louvre
Italian Paintings
Raffaello Santi, dit Raphaël
1483-1520 La Vierge à l'Enfant avec le petit saint Jean-Baptiste dite la Belle Jardinière
This painting by Raphael symbolizes the hallowed French institution that, to
the overwhelming majority of American painters, represented everything to which
they aspired. "To become an artist": for generations of American painters, the
idea was the holy grail and the experience of Paris was essential to this goal,
the indispensable rite of passage. Paris alone could confer the stamp of
legitimacy.American painters freshly arrived in the French capital, were
enthusiastic about its institutions, its prestigious museums, schools and
studios, and the Louvre, of course, with its immense riches, figured first on
their list.
As a venerated academician, as their honored mentor, French masters such as
Gerome would regularly bring his students to the Louvre to study and copy such
masterpieces, thus introducing their American charges to unknown artistic
experiences, Classical art and nude models. "You wanted to know the Romans?"
Eakins asked. "There they are real. Gérôme knows them. He knows all men. [. .
.] Maybe he will be a gladiator some day. How proud it would make him. [. . .]
Gérôme has given us the people, the grand old people of the Bible and the
Arabian nights." In France, drawing from live models was part of artistic
apprenticeship from the very first day. "Observe how your muscles are inlaid
against one another," Gérôme told his students. "They are carpentered. Yes,
there's something in your drawing-but it is not the vivacity of flesh. Go next
Sunday to the Louvre and study the drawings of Raphaël. He doesn't work as hard
as you in drawing, yet one feels the elasticity of flesh built of flexible
fibers, articulated around the bone, and wrapped in satin. You tell me you'll
express that texture afterward. I tell you that Raphaël expressed if from the
first stroke."
WASHINGTON D.C.
Corcoran
Frederic E. Church's majestic landscape "Niagara," stunned critics at the 1867
Exposition Universelle. Convinced of the superiority of its landscape artists,
the American selection committee determined that they should be heavily
represented in that manifestation. The selection included Albert Bierstadt,
Sanford Gifford, George Inness, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Kensett, Jervis
McEntree, Frederic Church, Worthington Whittredge--collectively known later as
the Hudson River School, the first truly "American" school of painting. In
breathtaking landscapes with sweeping, dramatic vistas, these painters seemed to
concretize the new conception of nature that had been emerging--a Jeffersonian
image of American Democracy --its ethical principles, its history, its
territory--a new conception of Nature, all-powerful and pure, the antidote to
European corruption. In 1804, as Jefferson dispatched Merriwether Lewis and
William Clark up the Missouri River, with the objective of finding the route
through the northwest territories that would join the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans. The project, lived as a national adventure, aroused the imagination of
the American people and made them aware of the immensity, the beauty and the
abundance of their countryside.
Fittingly, the works shipped to Paris illustrated some of the most celebrated
landscapes in the country, and among them, Church's "Niagara" was considered a
masterpiece. An enormous canvas, it depicted the Falls at their most majestic,
"with only the roar left out," as an admiring journalist wrote. One enthusiastic
British critic, astonished that such a talented painter was American, asked :
"But how long has he lived in England?" And in fact, when the American paintings
received mostly contempt--compared to the flood of medals going to French
artists--thirty-two in all--the American showing was pitifulnly Church's
"Niagara" won a medal.
National Gallery
National Gallery: Jackson Pollock web feature
Jackson Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)
Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist),1950, National Gallery of Art,
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1976.37.1 "It is impossible to make a forgery of
Jackson Pollock's work," Time magazine critic Robert Hughes claimed in 1982. It
is a telling comment that gets to the heart of Pollock's authenticity as an
artist." Lavender Mist about sums up his most ravishing, atmospheric
painting.... Pollock used the patterns caused by the separation and marbling of
one enamel wet in another, the tiny black striations in the dusty pink, to
produce an infinity of tones."
The youngest son of a Western family deeply scarred by financial troubles,
professional failures, and constant uprooting, Jackson Pollock represented the
beginning of a new era for American painters, not just at home but on the
international stage. The Pollock myth derives its power from the painter's
symbolizing the entire trajectory of the American artist's journey, and
embodying the entire spectrum of the recent transformations of the role of art
within society.
Pollock's 1948 "Lavendar Mist," characteristic of his most spontaneous and
expressive one-shot paintings. Between 1944, when he painted "Gothic" on an
easel, and 1948, when he laid the canvas on his studio floor, Pollock, as though
burning all bridges, committed himself to a potent expression of his emotions
with prodigious speed. He revolutionized his approach. With the canvas on the
floor, his body hunched over it, he dipped his brush into a can of paint and,
leaning on one leg, circled the painting in a slow and steady motion, throwing
the paint with a rhythmic movement of his forearm, dancing around his art. "My
painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before
painting. I prefer to tack the stretched canvas on the hard wall or the floor. I
need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel
nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work
from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method
of the Indian sand painters of the West..."
"Jackson broke the ice." That was how Willem de Kooning described the emergence
of Abstract Expressionism in the years immediately following the Second World
War. "Then came Jackson" might be another way of putting it. Bolstered by his
brothers, his artist friends, and his psychiatrists, encouraged by the critics
Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, supported by Lee Krasner, Peggy
Guggenheim, and Betty Parsons, and transformed into a media star by the camera
lens of photographer Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock developed his art
spasmodically, in the moments between crises and depressions. Other artists
associated with Pollock, such as Mark Rothko, De Kooning, Robert Motherwell,
Gorky, William Baziotes, and Barnett Newman, among others, took slower advantage
of the new conditions for art emerging in America, solidifying an aesthetic
movement that Pollock had perhaps not even realized he had started.
PHILADELPHIA
Philadelphia Musuem of Art
Thomas Eakins: American Realist
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Modern and Contemporary Art
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)
SITE: Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)
Marcel Duchamp, American, born France, 1887-1968
1912
Oil on canvas
57 7/8" x 35 1/8"
The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950
1950-134-59
This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited in New York in February
1913 at the historic Armory Show of contemporary art, where perplexed Americans
saw it as representing all the tricks they felt European artists were playing at
their expense. The picture's outrageousness surely lay in its seemingly
mechanical portrayal of a subject at once so sensual and time-honored. The
Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed from its remarkable aggregation of
avant-garde concerns: the birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the
Futurists' depiction of movement; the chromophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey,
Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins; and the redefinitions of time and space
by scientists and philosophers. The painting was bought directly from the Armory
Show for three hundred dollars by a San Francisco dealer. Marcel Duchamp's great
collector-friend Walter Arensberg was able to buy the work in 1927, eleven years
after Duchamp had obligingly made him a hand-colored, actual-size photographic
copy. Today both the copy and the original, together with a preparatory study,
are owned by the Museum.
Duchamp left France for New York on June 6, 1915 aboard the S. S. Rochambeau. A
young man calmly puffing his pipe, he looked somewhat austere, his clean-shaven,
impassive face an enigmatic mask. The youngest son in a family of artists from
Puteaux, Normandy, he had only just been discovered in his own country. His
oldest brother Gaston, known as Jacques Villon, was an engraver and painter; the
more famous middle brother, Raymond, who called himself Duchamp-Villon, was a
sculptor. Marcel, who had learned much from his brothers, went about his art
with considerable independence.
But just who was this young artist at the moment when he embarked for New York?
His temperament seemed as plastic as his gifts. Duchamp announced that he wanted
to "put painting back in the service of the spirit," and was "more interested in
ideas than in visual products." He illustrated the poems of Jules Laforgue,
including "Again to this Star"--"less for the poems than for their titles," as
he put it. He experimented with movement and perspective, reading the works of
the chronophotograph theorists [first name] Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, and
[first name] Londe, who sought ways of giving "solidified movement" expression,
and whose motto was "reduce, reduce, reduce." He liked to provoke and had no
patience for either the "ordinary habits of thinking" or the "platitudes of the
café and the studio."
In the fall of 1911 Duchamp went to the Antoine Theatre with the Picabias to see
the rollicking production of Raymond Roussel's "Impressions of Africa," and was
amazed by the poetry of such lines as "the letters of white on the bands of the
old billiard ball/the letters of white on the bands of the old plunderer." He
decided then and there that Roussel had "shown him the road art must take:
intellectual expression rather than animal expression." And so the painter was
also a linguist who followed in the footsteps of Jules Romains and Apollinaire,
who studied language by means of an incredible network of puns, an
indiosyncratic wit, who played with Alfred Jarry and the others at inventing new
forms of humor. They embraced a spontaneous new approach to humor, one that
began by using words as "verbal cells in their pure denominative capacity"
before turning to "the anarchic development of these cells when confronted with
certain catalysts," and finally to "tearing the connective tissue that held them
all together." He was a theorist who criticized the Italian Futurists Severini,
Marinette, and Boccioni for what he called their "impressionism of the
mechanical world." And Marcel Duchamp was a pundit, a poet, a dandy, an
aesthete, a populist, an artist. He left a Europe at war, taking with him as
luggage his talents and his bric-a-brac of passions--LautrŽamont, Apollinaire,
Roussel, Brisset, chess, and the Vermot almanac.
In 1920, Marcel Duchamp returned to New York and picked up working with Katerine
Dreier and her Anonymous Society, along with Hartley, Stella, Covert, Ray, Elsa
von Freytag-Loringhoven. Duchamp's love of subversion led to his exploration of
the readymade, Dada sculptures in which he would sign and exhibit banal,
ready-made objects, such as snow shovels or bottle racks. Presented unchanged as
works of art, thesen works represented a shift in context from the utilitarian
to the aesthetic. Duchamp coined the term in a letter to his sister, in which he
described his first two readymades, "Bicycle Wheel" and "Bottle Rack" (both
1913), fashioned from objects he had bought at the Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville.
Later, in his "assisted" readymades, he would combine found objects, making a
three-dimensional collage. He produced a mustachioed Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q, as
well as a Rembrandt painting that he transformed into an ironing board. At the
same time he continued to work on "The Married Woman Made Naked by the
Bachelors, Even."
Aided and abetted by Man Ray and John Covert, Duchamp pushed back the limits of
outrageousness. Before a select gathering of New Yorkers, he insisted that the
poet-boxer Arthur Cravan stand up and deliver a lecture, knowing full well the
man was dead drunk. Cravan obliged and the newspapers raved. Beyond the
anecdote, New York was in fact becoming a true center for aesthetic
experimentation. The city had at last begun to take modernity to its heart, a
romance that would never end. Braque had been wounded by a shell, Duchamp-Villon
and Apollinaire were dead, Villon and others profoundly traumatized or reduced
to silence.
