Midterm Flashcards
“Object to be Destroyed”
1923, 1932 destroyed
1957.
Is a work by American artist Man Ray, originally created in 1923. The work, destroyed in 1957, consisted of a metronome with a photograph of an eye attached to its swinging arm. It was remade in multiple copies in later years, and renamed Indestructible Object. It is considered a “readymade”, following in the relatively new tradition established by Marcel Duchamp of employing ordinary manufactured objects that usually were modified very little, if at all, in works of art.
According to Man Ray, the piece was originally intended as a silent witness in his studio to watch him paint.
John Heartfield,
And Yet it Moves!
1943.
John Heartfield was one of the most popular Dadaism artists during it’s time.
The painting pretty much is showing that even with what was going on in Germany and how many people were going hungry and dying, the world was still turning. Hitler is on top of the Earth to show that the world still turns even with the weight of what Hitler’s done sitting on top of it.
This piece refers to a remark made by Galileo when he was forced to deny his belief that the Earth moved around the sun. Upon his release from the Inquisition, he stamped the Earth with his foot and said, “And yet it moves.” This image shows that despite Hitler’s terror, the world survived.
Lucia Moholy,
Portrait Florence Henri,
1927
Alvin Coburn
Vortograph
1917
was an early 20th-century photographer who became a key figure in the development of American pictorialism. He became the first major photographer to emphasize the visual potential of elevated viewpoints and later made some of the first completely abstract photographs.
After experimenting with multiple exposures, Coburn in 1916 invented a kaleidoscope-like instrument with three mirrors clamped together, which when fitted over the lens of a camera would reflect and fracture the image. Pound dubbed the device a “Vortescope” and the resulting photographs “Vortographs.”
Andre Kertesz,
Underwater Swimmer,
1917.
Steiglitz,
The Steerage,
1910
It has been hailed as one of the greatest photographs of all time because it captures in a single image both a formative document of its time and one of the first works of artistic modernism.
Much has been written about scene as a cultural document of an important period when many immigrants were coming to America. In fact, the picture was taken on a cruise to Europe from America, and for that reason some critics have interpreted it as recording people who were turned away by U.S. Immigration officials and were forced to go back home. Although some of the passengers might have been turned back because of failure to meet financial or health requirements for entrance, it is more likely that most of them were various artisans who worked in the booming construction trade of the time.
Alexander Rodchenko,
Fire Escape (with a man),
1925.
The Russian photographer from the early twentiethcentury was one of the most influential figures in the history of photography.
Rodchenko’s main goal was for photography to be recognized as an art form ± the art of his time. He believed photography had the possibility to create a truly contemporary art.
In fact,he abandoned µpure art in favor of photography because he saw in it the visual language thatcould address a mass audience so crucial to the political climate he was living in. This wascritical for Rodchenko because in his utopian Constructivist thinking, he believed with a newform of art he could help transfigure the world and mankind.
Alfred Steiglitz,
Winter on 5th Avenue,
New York.
1893.
was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form.
Sometime in late 1892 Stieglitz bought his first hand-held camera, a Folmer and Schwing 4x5 plate film camera.
Alvin Coburn,
The Octopus.
1912.
Couched in the soft velvety nap of the platinum paper, composed in the languid lines of Art Nouveau, and softly focused, this photograph of New York’s Madison Square employs many elements of Pictorialism at its best. However, the dizzying effect of Coburn’s aerial view and his fascination with the skyscraper are distinctly and precociously modern. The blend of Pictorialist technique and fresh vision was characteristic of the transitional moment when Alfred Stieglitz, Coburn, Karl Struss, and Paul Strand began to celebrate contemporary urban experience.
Paul Strand,
White Fence.
1916.
Paul Strand created a bold photograph by eliminating perspective and emphasizing tonal planes and rhythmic pattern.
“Why did I photograph that white fence up in Port Kent, New York, in 1916? Because the fence itself was fascinating to me. It was very much alive, very American, very much a part of the country . . . “ —Paul Strand
Josef Sudek,
Panoramic Landscape Along the Elbe.
1956.
The Czech photographer Josef Sudek was a master of the Kodak Panoram Camera. He is renowned for his panoramas of Prague. Sudek made contact prints, not enlargements, of his negatives in order to show as much detail and tonal range as possible.
Andre Kertesz,
The Tender Touch.
1918.
Man Ray,
Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy.
1920-‐21.
was one of the pseudonyms of artist Marcel Duchamp. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase “Eros, c’est la vie”, which translates to English as “eros, that’s life”. It has also been read as “arroser la vie” (“to make a toast to life”).
Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray of Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s, Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it.
Anton Bragaglia,
Change of Position.
1911.
The Italian Futurist movement was heralded in 1909 with the publication of the poet F. T. Marinetti’s “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” which espoused a love of danger, the beauty of speed, the glory of war, and the destruction of museums and libraries.
Like the painters who attempted to reproduce the sensation of dynamism rather than to create a fixed moment, Bragaglia sought to replace the objective reality of a subject captured in an instantaneous snapshot with a projection of the subject’s interior essence, which he identified as pure movement. In this photodynamic study of a man changing from a seated position with his hands clasped on crossed legs to one where he is leaning forward with his fists at his temples, it is neither the beginning of his action nor its conclusion–nor any stage in between–that is significant, but rather the trajectory created by the sweeping arc of continuous, fluid motion, resulting in the dissolution, or dematerialization, of the subject.
El Lissitzky,
The Constructor.
1924.
The essence of New Vision photography is pointedly expressed in this picture, commonly known as The Constructor, which puts the act of seeing at center stage. Lissitzky’s hand, holding a compass, is superimposed on a shot of his head that explicitly highlights his eye: insight, it expresses, is passed through the eye and transmitted to the hand, and through it to the tools of production. Devised from six different exposures, the picture merges Lissitzky’s personae as photographer (eye) and constructor of images (hand) into a single likeness.
Contesting the idea that straight photography provides a single, unmediated truth, Lissitzky held instead that montage, with its layering of one meaning over another, impels the viewer to reconsider the world. It thus marks a conceptual shift in the understanding of what a picture can be.
Hannah Hoch,
The Beautiful Girl.
1920.
German Dada feminist artist Hannah Höch
The Dada movement was an artistic and literary movement that began in 1916 and arose as a reaction to World War I
John Heartfield.
Adolf the Superman Swallows gold and talks junk.
1932.
The photomontage technique allowed Heartfield to create a satirical image by combining different photographs: a portrait of Hitler, an X-ray of a human body, a vertebral column of gold coins, and the insignia of the Nazi party, a swastika, placed over his heart.
The X-rayed torso is used as a metaphor to expose Hitler’s hidden interest in financial power. This was seen by the communists as being contradictory to his pro-working-class speeches.
Claude Cahun,
Self Portrait.
1927.
was a French artist, photographer and writer. Her work was both political and personal, and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality.
In many ways, Cahun’s life was marked by a sense of role reversal, and her public identity became a commentary upon not only her own, but the public’s notions of sexuality, gender, beauty, and logic. Her adoption of a sexually ambiguous name, and her androgynous self-portraits display a revolutionary way of thinking and creating, experimenting with her audience’s understanding of photography as a documentation of reality.
Laszlo Moholy-‐Nagy,
Kinetic Sculpture Moving.
1933.
was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.
After his death, it was dubbed the “Light-Space Modulator” and was seen as a pioneer achievement of kinetic sculpture. It might more accurately be seen as one of the earliest examples of Light Art.
Alfred Steigletz,
Equivalent series,
1927
Stieglitz photographed clouds from 1922 into the thirties. A symbolist aesthetic underlies these images, which became increasingly abstract equivalents of his own experiences, thoughts, and emotions.
The theory of equivalence had been the subject of much discussion at Gallery 291 during the teens, and it was infused by Kandinsky’s ideas, especially the belief that colors, shapes, and lines reflect the inner, often emotive “vibrations of the soul.” In his cloud photographs, which he termed Equivalents, Stieglitz emphasized pure abstraction, adhering to the modern ideas of equivalence, holding that abstract forms, lines, and colors could represent corresponding inner states, emotions and ideas.
Florence Henri,
Jeanne Lanvin.
1929.
Gloria Swanson,
photographed by Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair,
1928.
Example of Alphonse Bertollon’s sectional photography entitled “Look At His Ears!”
Circa 1880’s.
Anthropometry demonstrated in an exhibit eugenics conference,
1921, USA.
