by Jeanne Willette | Feb 10, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Criticism, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (1925-2008) Robert Rauschenberg had served in the Navy, as a nurse, during the Second World War, and, like many men of his generation, went to college on the G.I Bill. After studying in Paris and New York, he found himself at the famous Black...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 3, 2012 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
THE MODERNISM OF MODERNIST PAINTING, 1960/1 Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting,” originally given as a radio broadcast in 1961 for the Voice of America’s “Forum Lectures,” was printed in 1961 in the Arts Yearbook 4 of the same year, reprinted in 1965, ’66,...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 27, 2012 | Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Postmodern
NEO-DADA—1950-1960 Neo or new Dada was named after Marcel Duchamp who, in the fifties, began to emerge from the underground to the surface of cutting edged art in New York. Neo-Dada did not come neatly “after” the leading movement, Abstract Expressionism,...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 21, 2012 | Modern Art, Modern Culture, Postmodern
FROM MODERNISM TO POST-MODERNISM POST-WAR ART IN AMERICA After the Second World War, the art world was characterized by “triumphalism” in New York and a feeling of having won, not just a military war but also a cultural war. The French and their School of Paris had...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 13, 2012 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
THE PROPAGANDA OF NAZI PAINTING Long sequestered and rarely viewed, recent art historical writings have begun to examine the art of Fascism. This series of podcasts, in four parts, attempts to answer a series of questions: what were the goals of Nazi art, who were the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 13, 2012 | Modern Art, Modern Culture, Postmodern
POST-WAR ART IN LOS ANGELES AND SAN FRANCISCO At first glance, California would seem to be an exceedingly unpromising place for major art to emerge in the second half of the Twentieth Century. A new state with a throwaway culture without a history, California had...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 6, 2012 | Modern Art, Modern Culture, Postmodern
BEAT CULTURE 1950s Most cultural movements are large-scale shifts in thinking due to a collective action on the part of many people. Beat Culture is unusual in that the concept of what it meant to be a Beat was based upon the writings and activities of a very few...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 30, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
ART IN SAN FRANCISCO 1940-1950 San Francisco was the center of high culture on the West Coast, boasting an opera and art museums and art schools while Los Angeles was a provincial oil town. Remarkably, the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 23, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
CULTURE IN LOS ANGELES 1940-1950 The City of Angels has many names, or to be more correct, many variations of its Spanish name: El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula. The locals have their own names for the city: “L.A.” and the “City of...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 16, 2011 | Modern, Modern Art
EVENTS FOR ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, 1945-1955 In 1946, former British prime minister, Winston Churchill made his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in March at Fulton, Missouri. According to Churchill, who had always been suspicious of Stalin, traditional fascism verses...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 16, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
THE OXYMORON OF NAZI “ART” Long sequestered and rarely viewed, recent art historical writings have begun to examine the art of Fascism. This series of podcasts, in four parts, attempts to answer a series of questions: what were the goals of Nazi art, who...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 9, 2011 | Modern, Modern Art
How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Meaning The Abstract Expressionist artists translated “meaning” from subject matter to the broader and deeper intent of the word. For these artists, “meaning”...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 2, 2011 | Modern, Modern Art
How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Content To work as an artist in New York City during the 1940s was to work in what the Chinese curse called “interesting times. The Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 25, 2011 | Modern, Modern Art
DEFINING ABSTRACTION EXPRESSIONISM “Abstract Expressionism” was term coined by Alfred Barr in 1929 in reference to Vasily Kandinsky’s art. “Abstract Expressionism,” as a term, was revived by Robert Coates in The New Yorker in 1946 to characterize work by...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 18, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
THE GERMAN ARTISTS BETWEEN THE WARS, PART ONE OTTO DIX In the period between World War I and World War II, Otto Dix dedicated his art to demonstrating with frank brutality the cost of war. While George Grosz leveled his attacks on self-satisfied bureaucrats, Dix...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 18, 2011 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Culture
The Historical Context of Abstract Expressionism The historical context of Abstract Expressionism can perhaps best be mapped out according to the theories of Pierre Bourdieu who coined the phrase “the field of cultural production.” What was the “field” which...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 11, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Culture
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF The Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 1939 by Clement Greenberg What is life? If one paraphrases the painter, Ad Reinhardt, “Life is everything that is not art or art is everything that is not life…” which means that much has been excluded from...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 4, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture
How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Meaning The American artists had early training from Modernist masters in New York City that prepared the ground with the abstract Cubism of Piet Mondrian and with Surrealist ideas and...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 28, 2011 | Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
THE ART SCENE SHIFTS FROM EUROPE TO AMERICA In 1983, art historian, Serge Guilbaut, wrote a provocatively titled book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. How, indeed? While the first chapter of this book discusses the politics of the New York intelligentsia...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 21, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
Trauerspielbuch (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), 1925 by Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschenTrauerspiels utilized a thought floated by Marx, that all art would become “allegorical” as a result of commodification and of its transformation into...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 14, 2011 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
Re-reading “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin Part Two “What is aura actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. Decades after the...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 14, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
THE GERMAN ARTISTS BETWEEN THE WARS, PART ONE GEORGE GROSZ Nothing is more sad than a perpetually disillusioned person. George Grosz spent his art career as a social critic; an artist who dissected his own tragic era with a knife-edged line. This podcast investigates...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 7, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Culture
Re-reading The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936 by Walter Benjamin Part One Also know as The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, this essay by Walter Benjamin has been published in three different versions. The...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 30, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
WALTER BENJAMIN (1892 -1940) Life and Work: Part Two Working for German publications, Walter Benjamin earned enough money to spend some months in Paris where, in 1927, he began his famous and unfinished Arcades Project. As one would imagine, he and his wife Dora...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 23, 2011 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Culture
WALTER BENJAMIN (1892 -1940) Life and Work: Part One Like many Jewish intellectuals in Germany, Walter Benjamin considered himself “German”. His family was privileged and fully assimilated into the larger German society. It would be this stratum of German society...
