BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

By Alexandra A Jopp The East has been very tempting to Western observers for centuries. It is an eternal enigma, an eternal “other,” unknown, exclusive and hidden from the eyes of Europeans under the black, silky veil of tokens and legends. It has typically been seen as a hot, restless, extremely emotional, vigorous, sometimes aggressive but invariably seductive and attractive world. Everything draws to it: its exteriors and interiors, its softness and aggressiveness, its love and hate. Delacroix Women of Algiers 1834    Copyright: http://www.annexgalleries.com/itemimages/sHS101.jpg  --> Most intriguing to European artists were often the East’s women. Almost always, there is a softness in the way they are depicted, but it is combined with a strength that is exhibited as they revel in the feel of their own glamour and essence. “Step back from the canvas, think, feel,” as Renoir would say (Nochlin 3). One must love a female body  in order ...

For some Europeans, especially those in the cultural elite, Americans will always be déclassé. The United States, in their conception, is the land where great art goes to be homogenized, a place forever more rearguard than avant-garde. Or, as Oscar Wilde put it, “America is the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” It is little surprise, then, that Surrealism, one of the most revolutionary art movements, came late to the U.S., not arriving to a significant degree, in fact, until the late-1930s, by which time it was already in decline in France. The American Man Ray, however, overcame the defect of his place of birth to become one of the era’s leading modernists, if not an official Surrealist. This, though, would only happen following the (immediate) failure of a New York-based Dada publication he founded with Marcel Duchamp and a subsequent move to Paris. Man Ray developed photographic techniques that would become crucial to Surrealism, us...

Slide 2 By Alexandra Jopp  Paris was in a state of magical metamorphosis between the World Wars   Ilse Bing, Eiffel Tower , 1934. Gelatin silver print  Ilse Bing, Danseuse-Cancan , Moulin Rouge, Paris, 1931.Gelatin silver print

Stuart Davis.  Smithsonian American Art Museum .  By Alexandra A. Jopp One of the foremost American Modernists to appear between the world wars, Stuart Davis became famous for cosmopolitan and remarkably bright compositions of American life --> Stuart Davis’s artistic interests were heavily influenced by European Modernist works exhibited at the 1913 New York Armory Show. The splendid display of Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist innovations kindled his interest in Modern art. Inspired, Davis developed his idea that his paintings, which included coastal views of New England , electric signs, gasoline stations, French cafés, and Parisian buildings, should “reveal a life of their own, rather than mirror reality.” 1 He insisted that, “The act of painting is not a duplication of experience, but the extension of experience on the plane of formal invention.” 2 Thus, Davis ’s subjects came from everyday life, something he explained in his essay The Cube Ro...