Module 7 Flashcards
Artists on WPA
Artist?
Moses Soyer, 1935
These artists hired by WPA were working in groups, others worked in their studios.
Many artists joined leftwing cultural groups, the artist union, became interested in the Soviet Union, socialism, and other types of governments.
Underground Railroad
Artist & Location?
James Michael Newell, 1940
Post Office, Dolgeville, NY
He produced several murals
Mohawk Valley, abolitionist farmer, underground railroad stop. The color pallet conveys secrecy and danger.
Composition, expansive background, means his long journey. Fresco style. His study is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The Family—Industry, and Agriculture
Artist & Location?
Harry Sternberg, 1939
Post Office, Ambler, PA
Celebrated archetypes
The family, traditional gender roles, a couple and baby
Industry and agriculture
Indian Hunters and Rice Gatherers
Artist & Location?
Margaret Martin, 1940
Post Office, St. James, MN
Early romanticized scene of native American life
History character and fate of native peoples were central to the meaning of America which people were searching for.
Cotton Pickers, Study for Wynne, study
Artist & Location?
Ethel Magafan, c. 1940
Arkansas, Post Office
She and her twin sister trained with Frank Macau, this one she did solo.
Indian Family Moving Camp
Artist & Location?
Stephen Mopope (Kiowa), 1937, Post Office, Anadarko, OK
This is a study
Painter of color, Kiowa refers to the Kiowa 5, a group of Kiowa artists that Mopoe was a part of with James Auchiah and Spencer Asah,
They produced 16 murals in Oklahoma.
Department of the Interior, Initiation Ceremony, detail
Artist?
Gerald Nailor, 1940
He is a native artist - Navajo
Commissioned by the Department of the Interior
for their new HQ in WADC
They had many dealings in the west so those themes were used throughout the building.
Buffalo Hunt
Artist & Location?
Woody Crumbo, 1939
Department of the Interior
Performed and taught Indian dances
He is a native artist - Potawatomi and Creek
@ University of Oklahoma he studied with Oscar Jacobson who supported the Kiowa 5
Construction of a Dam
Artist, when was it installed?
William Gropper, 1937
installed 1939
This was also for Interior
Conveys drama, strength, and dignity of labor.
Inspired by Hoover and Grand Coulee damn.
Heroic white male workers working together
Man Controlling Trade (one of a pair)
Artist & Location?
Michael Lanz, 1942
Federal Trade Commission building, Washington, D.C
Murals and sculptures were installed in and around federal buildings in the capital, this is a muscular pair, a man and a horse
Migrant Mother
Artist & Location?
Dorothea Lange,
Nipomo, CA, 1936
For the FSA, Farmers Security Administration.
One of a series of photos of the subject, Florence Owens Thompson, and her children.
Symbol of endurance. Despair in need of sympathetic help.
Washroom and Dining Area of Floyd Burroughs’s Home
Artist & Location?
Walker Evans, 1936
Hale County, Alabama
Documentary photographer.
Desstitue ag workers
Used 8 by 10 view camera and not a handheld, they look more staged or posed than others.
Artist first. He cleaned up the Dining Area.
Some artists used a flash and other photo-enhancing agents.
Freedom from Want
Artist?
Norman Rockwell, 1943
Saturday Evening Post.
Propaganda engine begins, the country at war is now well fed and through the depression.
Central, small-town life.
One of 4 Freedoms, oil paintings.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s essential human rights that need protection - freedom from want, from fear, of speech, of worship.
Prometheus
Artist?
José Clemente Orozco, 1930
This is at Pamona College
The hero is punished for taking the fire of knowledge from the gods and gave it to humans.
Mexican muralist
Allegory of California
Artist and Location?
Diego Rivera,
Pacific Stock Exchange, San Francisco, CA
Met with guarded praise for its color and content by critics.
A sharp critique of American agribusiness owned by few powerful and rich in California. Those former farms that were captured by fsa photographers are not factories in the field.
Henry Howard Coit Tower
Location? When was it built?
San Francisco, CA, 1933
City Life (left Section, Coit Tower) Artist and Location?
Victor Arnautoff, 1934
San Francisco, CA
Inspired by Rivera’s work.
Coit Twr Murals were commissioned by the public works of an art project of 1934
most controversial government-sponsored art project on the west coast
Subjects: Economic conditions leading to worker strikes. The Masses journals shown being sold at the newsstand.
Troubling references caused critics to try and delay the opening.
The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti
Artist?
Ben Shahn, 1932
Politically active artist
FSA photographer also
This is one of a 23 painting series of this trial - robbery and murder trial - which garnered international fame cause it was thought they received a guilty verdict because of their anarchist politics.
Coal mural
Artist, name the series, who it’s for, location & designer.
Thomas Hart Benton, mural from the series America Today, for the New School of Social Research, NY, 1930, designed by Joseph Urban
Politically active artist
Regionalist painter of rural and urban life
Regarded his work as ‘National art’ - of the American worker, meaningful to many
This, one of 10 mural in a series called America today industrial and ag workers.
Men at work, miners exhausted - a critique.
At the Met.
Detroit Industry (south wall, Assembly Line) Artist & Location?
Diego Rivera, 1932-33
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Industry commissioned art to portray themselves as enlightened capitalists with the worker at their center. Ford commissioned this, theme of Detroit auto industry.
Rivera wanted to spread his political ideas internationally and gain recognition to an American audience so he took it.
Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (north wall), Motor Assembly
Diego Rivera, 1932-33
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Celebrated workers and technology
Raises questions about tech’s ability to enslave and liberate
His wife was Frida - also depicted the ford motor company in a portrait of herself around this time.
Criss-Crossed Conveyers
Artist, Magazine?
Charles Sheeler, 1927
(reproduced in Vanity Fair, February 1928)
Modernist artist
Hired by an ad agency
This, ford’s river rouge plant in dearborn
reproduced for art and commercial mags.
He liked the structures more than the people.
These of industry and power
American Landscape
Artist?
Charles Sheeler, 1930
Precisionist. Grounded in American ideals. This also of Ford Motor Company plant on the River Rouge near Detroit, Michigan. Innovation of American industry Corporate patronage. Sheeler, from Pennsilvania like Demuth.
Classic Landscape
Artist?
Charles Sheeler, 1931
Precisionist.
Grounded in American ideals.
celebrated Ford Motor Company Glass Plant, and industry
Corporate patronage.
Radiator Building, Night, New York
Artist?
Georgia O’Keeffe, 1927
Modern architectural subject
Fewer women portray architectural subjects, but this is an exception.
Woolworth Building, No. 31
Artist?
John Marin, 1912
Inspired by New York landscapes, series of watercolors of the Woolworth Building, new structures, city changing from low brownstones to a city of skyscrapers.
My Egypt
Artist?
Charles Demuth, 1927
Industrial structures, Pennsylvania, Lancaster.
Linking the great structure of ancient Egypt to a modern industrial one
Not the result of corporate patronage.
Aesthetic similarities with Sheeler
Fort Peck Dam, Montana, cover
Artist, Magazine & Issue?
Margaret Bourke-White,
of first issue of Life, 23 November 1936
Photo essay, first issue, 16 of her photos were published in this issue, biggest earthen damn. Hydroelectric power and irrigation.
City Activities with Dance Hall, mural
Artist, name the series, who it’s for, location?
Thomas Hart Benton,
from the series America Today, for the New School of Social Research, NY, 1930
The new woman. Sexualized. Woman at work in the city. Recreational life, people at work, women at work were acrobats, dancers and shown in a highly sexualized manner. Entertainers. Burlesque.
Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks,
Artist, Magazine, Issue?
John Held, Jr.,
Life, 18 February 1926
The flapper is a symbol of the New Woman. transgress many social norms for women - body, dress, attitudes, etc. Here, a flapper dances the Charleston with an old dude.
Office Girls
Artist?
Raphael Soyer, 1936
Women at work - respectable, modestly yet stylishly dressed
Office at Night
Artist?
Edward Hopper, 1940
The careful line between fashionable and being proper.
Alienation, isolation of city life, and the sexual politics of the office. Young woman in form fitting dress works late with a male boss.
The Fitting Room
Artist?
Kenneth Hayes Miller, 1931
Matronly women, figures are bountiful, like classical Greek statues, shopping activity, consumption-oriented, bargins.
Leaving the Shop
Artist and medium?
Kenneth Hayes Miller,
1929, etching
renaissance-like sketch, giving dignity to the ordinary act of shopping
Spring Sale at Bendel’s
Artist?
Florine Stettheimer, 1922
Crazed nature of bargain hunters. Flapper dresses.
Automat
Artist?
Edward Hopper, 1927
City as a lonely place, for single women especially, original fast food restaurant - the Automat - no human contact.
Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue
Artist and location?
Berenice Abbott, 1936
Manhattan
Here is the Automat, photo of the vending side.
Erosions No. 2: Mother Early Laid Bare
Artist?
Alexandre Hogue, 1938
Rural America, the other side of New Deal Murals.
Portrayed here is the drought of the 1930s, over-cultivation of the land. Paradies the work of the regionalists, Grant Wood and John Stewart Curry
Drought Stricken Area
Artist?
Alexandre Hogue, 1934
Once productive farm. Only living creatures are a skinny cow looking for water and a vulture looking on.
American Gothic
Artist?
Grant Wood, 1930
Regionalist Painter. This is Wood’s most famous painting.
Wood’s sister and dentist. Carpenter gothic backdrop.
Prototypical mid-western man and woman.
Long faces, careful details, hard light look like Northern renaissance portraits.
Poses look like 19c photographs.
She felt the first sting of slavery
Artist? From what series?
Jacob Lawrence, 1939-40
from Harriet Tubman series,
Fascism
Artist?
Harry Sternberg, 1942
Represented current events. Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany. The steady rise of nazism of the and establishment of the 3rd Reich. The invasion of Poland marks the beginning of WWII. Enemies of the state. Mussolini, spread Fascism.
The three-headed monster is Mussolini, Hitler, Hirohito
War Relocation Authority
Artist, Location, Date?
Dorothea Lange,
Hayward, California, 8 May 1942
The WRA was in charge of internment. This picture shows a man with grandsons, tagged as if waiting for shipping.
Lange was hired by the war relocation authority to document the relocation process and daily life at the camps. Ansel Adams also hired, took a more positive view - born free and equal book.
Manzanar Relocation Center
Artist?
Toyo Miyatake, c. 1942-45
LA professional photographer he was interned at Manzanar. Reflect bleak desolation of most campsites.
Then on December 7, 1941, while my brother and I were having a late breakfast, I turned on the radio and heard the flash—“Pearl Harbor bombed by the Japanese!” We were shocked. We wondered what this would mean to us and the other people of Japanese descent in the United States.
Miné Okubo
From Citizen 13660 (1946)
Representation of internment via sketches.
Mine and her brother were interned at Topaz 42-44
189 sketches document daily life for internees. Title of book Citizen 13660 # assigned to the family unit.
When Can We Go Home?
Artist?
Henry Sugimoto, 1943
Interned in Gerome and Rohwer.
42-45
Focus on camp life, but in modernist style
Struggled to maintain a sense of dignity and identity.
We Can Do It!!
Artist?
J. Howard Miller, 1943
Keep spirits up on the homefront - produced by the US gov. Pittsburg artist
For Westing House Electric’s internal war production coordinating committee - boost worker morale, reduce absenteeism, lower likelihood of factory strike, to help direct questions to management.
Most featured men, this rediscovered in the 1980s, she is called Rosie the riveter. Assumed that this image is always used to inspire women to join the war efforts, but it’s just internal, only displayed for a small time. Inspiring already hired women to work harder.
Rosie the Riveter, Saturday Evening Post
Artist and year?
Norman Rockwell, 29 May 1943
Women had entered the workforce, getting paid more *but not as much as men counterparts.
returned back to the home once the war was over
This event plunges America into the Great Depression
Event and Year?
1929
Through this program, the United States became a major patron of the arts.
Through the relief and recovery programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the New Deal
He was elected in 1933
These are executed throughout the nation and were federally sponsored through the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts from 1934-43
Post Office Murals
People at work or play, content related to the place where they were located.
1400 commissions. Arts won competitions.
The Section was preceded by the federal works of art project. Not the WPA
Competitions were judged gender blind -
Many women painted Post Office Murals.
Many muralists from New Mexico and Harlem/Ney York City were artists of color.
Photographers of the Farm Security Administration document 1930s America
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They didn’t show a bucolic and productive America.
These artists set powerful presidents for public art. US Gov. was not comfortable with their communist stance
The Mexican Muralists work in America
He believed that art should be for everyone, not just the privileged few.
Holger Cahill, director of the Federal Art Project.
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects.
What is the WPA?
Works Progress (Projects) Administration - Largest & most ambitious of all programs. est. 1935. The umbrella name for the government agency that included the Federal Arts Project
Regionalist artists focused on what subject matter?
Midwestern farms and small towns.
Social realists focused on what subject matter?
Celebrating industrial workers.
What was the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information?
FSA became OOWI when WWII started
Their photo collection, extensive record of American life from 33-44’
Who was Roy Striker and who inspired him?
He leads the US Photography Project under the
Resettlement Administration (33-37)
FSA (37-42)
Office of War Information (42-44).
His job was to capture rural and small-town life whose residents had been hit hard by foreclosure and drought.
Its purpose was to document what the government had done and what it still needed to do. An extended portrait of America during the ’30s.
Hired photographers during the great depression.
He was inspired by Louis Hine whose work helped southern farm labor.
What years does the photo collection of the FSA and Office of War Information cover?
1933-1944
Included photos from Resettlement Admin, FSA, Office of War Information, other government and non-government sources, news bureau of the offices of Emergency Management, Military and industrial companies.
175K b/w film negatives
What subjects are covered in the 1600 color photos shot by FSA photographers from 1939-44
Rural areas and farm labor, WWII mobilization like factories, railroads, aviation training, women working.
This group of artists saw inspiration in modern industry.
Smooth, sharply defined painting style used by several American artists primarily during the 1920s. Geometric structures were portrayed in cubist, realist styles. Felt industrial structures were comparable to gothic french cathedrals and Egyptian pyramids.
Precisionists
Magazines celebrated industry and labor, reinforced its image of the new corporate America by publishing many works of art.
Fortune & Life
Commissioned Sheeler, Demuth, and documentary photographs.
How were women depicted in these artworks? Who was The New Woman?
Flappers of the 1920s were young women known for their energetic freedom, embracing a lifestyle viewed by many at the time as outrageous, immoral, or downright dangerous.
Depictions of independent working women were aligned with the development of cities and spaced of modernity, changes in social & sexual morays associated with “the new woman” cast as sexual objects.
What was regionalism and who were the three main artists who represented this movement?
Thoman Heart Benton, John Stewart Curry, Grant Wood
Also known as American Scene Painting.
Modernist in style, they focused on representational scenes of rural subjects, heartland America that is reassuring. This was a national style reinforced by WPA murals. They wanted to create distinctly American art. grounded in midwestern folk types.
Who was Jacob Lawrence?
He was an important 19c narrative painter focused on subjects of life in Harlem and the history of AA. Raised in Harlem, he is exposed to leading AA artists like Aaron Douglas, African art, AA History, sculptor Savage helps him get into The American Artist School.
He works for WPA as painter.
He is known for the Migration of the Negro series which depicted the move from the rural south to northern cities. Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglas. Abolitionists. Underground Railroad. He has a solo show at the MET
First AA artist to be represented by a New York Gallery.
What was Citizen 13660?
A book of illustrations was drawn by Miné Okubo who was interned at Topaz, Utah. This referred to the number that her family was given.
These were the result of Executive order 9066.
Issued by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
13 internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII from 1942-45.
California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Arkansas.
2/3 American born.
This agency was in charge of internment camps.
War Relocation Authority.
Many artists joined leftwing cultural groups, like this one, became interested in the Soviet Union, socialism, and other types of governments.
Artists’ Union
