BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

ART DECO A sleek, geometric, elegant style of decorative art, set against the world’s economic depression between the two world wars, in the 1920’s and 1930’s; and embracing painting, buildings, furniture, fashion, jewellery, sculpture, ceramics, interior design, vehicles, ships, graphics, etc. Notable examples are - the fashions of Paul Poiret, influenced by the Ballets Russes); the Odeon Cinema designs; Chryselephantine figurines, (bronze and ivory); Ceramics by Clarice Cliff; Sunray motif on gates and doors of suburban houses. Art Deco brought fashion into the workaday world. It was a reaction to the austerity and deprivation occasioned by World War 1. ELEVATOR DOOR: Chrysler Building. New York  “Jazz Age” designs; Early Sky-Scrapers (Chrysler Building, New York); Exotic, new materials - glass, leather, fabrics, metals, platinum, onyx, ebony, chrome, plastic, lacquer, agate, coral, bakelite, tortoiseshell, jade, rhinestones, jet and moonstones. CLARICE CLIFF Sun...

SURREALISM A movement in Art and Literature originating in France and flourishing in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Characterised by a fascination with the bizarre, the incongruous and the irrational. It was conceived as a revolutionary mode of thought and action, a way of life rather than a set of stylistic attitudes, and in this, resembled Dadaism, its principal source. André Breton, the main theoretician of the movement said its purpose was ‘ to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality – a super reality’. He and the members of the movement drew liberally on the theories of Sigmund Freud concerning the subconscious mind and its relations to dreams, but the way in which they set about exploration of submerged impulses and imagery varied greatly. Some artists – Ernst, Masson and Miró cultivated various spontaneous techniques such as frottage, in an effort to eliminate conscious control. It was in painting where Surrealism received it...

Painter, printmaker, and occasional sculptor. The iconic  abstract expressionist , he forged a singular style of great expressive power. Skeins of dripped, poured, and flung paint dominate his key  all-over paintings  of the late 1940s and early 1950s. "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act- rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."  - Harold Rosenberg in The American Action Painter "The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is a Gothic, morbid, and extreme disciple of Picasso's Cubism and Miró's post-Cubism, tinctured also with Kandinsky and surrealist inspiration. His name is Jackson Pollock." - Clement Greenberg in 1947 By Alexandra A Jopp Allan Kaprow, in the 1958 essay “The Legacy...

Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Nighthawks, 1942, AIC Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by a "restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet." T he “empty triangular lot” where Greenwich meets 11th Street and Seventh Avenue, otherwise known as Mulry Square. But  the image - with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative - has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of the twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Hopper's understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing upon the simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the lig...

By Alexandra A Jopp The emergence of Conceptualism marked a critical moment in late twentieth century art. British philosopher Peter Osborne described the movement as “An art of ideas, which can be written, published, performed, fabricated, or which can simply remain inside your head – it is also an art of questions.” Since its arrival in the mid-1960s, it has challenged views about society, politics and mass media around the world. Vadim Zakharov, History of Russian Art from the Russian Avant-Garde to Moscow Conceptualism, installation, 2004 E. Dyogot Classification of Moscow Conceptualism 1991 The term Conceptual art came into use in the late-1960s to describe a wide range of types of art that no longer took the form of conventional art objects. It referred to a type of work in which the idea is paramount, and the material form is secondary. Thomas Crow, in fact, suggested that Conceptual art is “against visual culture.” In the 1970s, Lucy Lippard produced a record ...

By Alexandra A Jopp When the Pop art movement emerged in New York 50 years ago, it immediately raised the question, what is Pop art? The most general explanation is that Pop art develops its imagery from popular and commercial culture. In the early 1960s, “by imitating the look of mass-produced images – from comic books, newspapers, and packaging design – Pop artists began to blur the lines between commercial and avant-garde art.” Hence, American Pop Art was both a product of and a reaction to Abstract Expressionist painting. Artists like Rauschenberg presented images of the world, often drawn from the mass media, using conventional painting rather than new mediums. As the readings demonstrate, Pop art was a rebellion against established traditions in art and life and “can be seen as one of the first manifestations of Postmodernism.” It could be argued, though, that the boundaries between Pop art and Abstract art are deceptive. For instance, the best-known American Pop artists, such...

The Contingency of Form: Humble Materials, Perception and Process By Alexandra A Jopp The phenomenological basis of the beholder’s experience is a necessity in Minimal art. How the viewer perceives the relationships among the various parts of the work and how he or she sees the work in its entirety is crucial. The reappearance of forms in Minimal sculpture provides highlights to the fine differences in the perception of those forms as the beholder’s perspective changes in time and space. Gestalt theory is an important part of expressing and perceiving the meaning of Morris’s works. He describes his method of gestalt as “parts ... bound together in such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual separation,” and further states that “indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing.” In his “Notes on Sculpture,” Morris writes that constancy of shape is to be obtained by the use of polyhedrons with “strong gestalt sensa...