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.