Week 3

September 12, 2006

<>Mark Rothko, Green and Maroon, 1953
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroica Sublimus, 1950-51
Barnett Newman, The Wild, 1950
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-09 and detail
Thomas Cole, Katerskill Falls, 1826
Thomas Cole, Niagara Falls, 1830

Clyfford Still, untitled, 1944-G
Clyfford Still, untitled no. 6, 1945-46
Clyfford Still, Indian Red and Black, 1946
Clyfford Still, untitled, 1948-C
Clyfford Still, untitled, 1954<>
Max Ernst, Europe after the Rain, 1940-1941

Alberto Giacometti, City Square, 1948
Alberto Giacometti, Composition with 9 Figures, 1950
Alberto Giacometti, Head of a Man on a Rod, 1947
Alberto Giacometti, Study for a Figure, 1954

Jean Fautrier, Head of a Hostage 1, 1943
Jean Fautrier, Oradour Sur Glane, 1944

Jean Dubuffet, Portrait of Fautrier, 1948
Jean Dubuffet, Botany and Geography, 1950
Jean Dubuffet, Head as the Red Peninsula, 1951
Jean Dubuffet, The Squinter (le Strabique), 1953
Jean Dubuffet, The Cellarman, 1946

Francis Bacon, Study for Figure at the Base of the Crucifixion, 1944
Francis Bacon, Study for Figure at the Base of the Crucifixion, 1944
Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946
Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait of Innocent X, 1953
Diego Velazquez, Portrait of Innocent X, 1650
Rembrandt, Carcass of an Ox, 1655
Chaim Soutine, Slaughtered Ox, 1925
Mies van der Rohe, Chrome and Leather Lounge Chair, 1927
LeCorbusier, chair, 1929

<>Asgar Jorn, Sentimental Assassin (Portrait of Dubuffet), 1961
Karel Appel, Cry for Liberty, 1948
Karel Appel, Figure, 1958
Karel Appel, Personage, 1958

Asgar Jorn, Paris by Night, 1959
Asgar Jorn, The Disquieting Duck, 1959


From the catalogue The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries.  MOMA 1959

Basel: “This in particular is the decisive character [of American painting]: the direct translation of unlimited space into the gesture of painting itself, whether into expanding form or the continual overflow and intermingling of forms.”

Madrid, “to judge the size of our transoceanic guests, a detail will surfice: to bring into the museum two of the canvases, one by Jackson Pollock and one by Grace Hartigan, required sawing the upper part of the metal entrance door of the building the night before the opening.”

“They all use vast dimensions, not from megalomania, but because one cannot say these things in miniature. . . . Americans are world travelers and conquerors."

Brussels: “primarily it offers that climate of unconstraint which never fails to strike anyone traveling to the United States for the first time."

“One examines with consternation ink spots measuring two yards by two and a half; graffiti enlarged 10,000 times, where a crayon stroke becomes as thick as a rafter…"

Paris: “the only greatness here is the in the size of the canvases"

London: "what cannot fail to strike any visitor and strike him forcefully ….is an impression of size; of size, moreover not merely in an inflationary sense, but as a natural assumption of scale"

"However often we may have heard of the size, the assurance, the headlong heedless momentum which characaterizes them all, we are still bowled over by these qualities when we are, as it were, physically involved with them."

Sartre on Giacommeti: "But sometimes, tired of warfare, he tried to mineralize his fellows: he saw crowds advancing blindly towards him, rolling on the boulevards like the stones of an avalanche....Each of them reveals man as one sees him to be, as he is for other men, as he appears in an intersubjective world, not, as I said above, to entangle himself at ten or twenty paces, but at a proper human distance; each shows us that man is not there first and to be seen afterwards, but that he is the being whose essence is to exist for others….At first glance we seem to be up against the fleshless martyrs of Buchenwald.  But a moment later we have quite a different conception; these fine and slender natures rise up to heaven, we seem to have come across a group of Ascensions, of Assumptions.”

Francis Ponge on Giacometti (1951): “Man—and man alone—reduced to a thread—in ruinous condition, the misery of the world—who looks for himself—starting from nothing.  Thin, naked, emaciated, all skin and bone.  Coming and going for no reason in the crowd.”

Jean Dubuffet:  "I see no great difference (metaphysically speaking) between the paste I spread and a cat, a trout or a bull.  My paste is a being as these are.  Less circumscribed to be sure, and more emulsified...foreign to us humans, who are so very circumscribed, so far from the formless, (or at least we think ourselves to be)."

Paul Tillich, from the catalogue New Images of Man (1959):
“Each period has its peculiar image of man….When in abstract or non-objective painting and sculpture, the figure disappears completely, one is tempted to ask, what has happened to man?…We should ask ourselves, what has become of us?  What has happened to the reality of our lives?  If we listen to the more profound observers of our period, we hear them speak of the danger in which modern man lives: the danger of losing his humanity and of becoming a thing amongst the things he produces.  Humanity is not something man simply has.  He must fight for it anew in every generation….One need only look at the dehumanizing structure of the totalitarian systems in one half of the world, and the dehumanizing consequences of technical mass civilization in the other half….The image of man has become transformed, distorted, disrupted and it finally disappeared in recent art….All of [these] show traces of the battle for the human image they want to rediscover…They fight desperately over the image of man, and by producing shock and fascination in the observer they communicate their own concern for threatened and struggling humanity.”  

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September 14, 2005

Asgar Jorn, The Disquieting Duck, 1959
Asgar Jorn, Paris by Night, 1959
Asgar Jorn, Sentimental Assassin: Portrait of Dubuffet, 1961
Karel Appel, Figure, 1958
Asgar Jorn, Temptation, 1960
Asgar Jorn, The Avant Garde Doesn't Give Up, 1962
Marcel Duchamp, LHOOQ, 1919
Francis Picabia, Portrait of Cezanne, Portrait of Renoir, Portrait of Rembrandt, Still Lives, 1920

Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Industrial Painting, 1959 (two views)
Alberto Burri, Composition, 1953
Alberto Burri, Grande Sacco, 1954
Alberto Burri, Wood Combustion, 1957
Alberto Burri, Red Plastic Combustion, 1957

Lucio Fontana,  Spatial Concept, 1952
Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, 1957
Barnett Newman, Tundra, 1948
Lucio Fontana,  Spatial Concept, 1965

Opening of the First International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920
Marcel Duchamp, Door at 11, rue Larrey, 1927

Opening of the First Papers of Surrealism, 1942
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
Marcel Duchamp, Trebucher, 1916-17
Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14
Marcel Duchamp, Tu 'm, 1918 (and detail)
Marcel Duchamp, Boite en valise, 1935-41
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even, 1915-23
Marcel Duchamp, Paris Air, 1919

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951
Robert Rauschenberg. Erased deKooning drawing, 1953
Willem deKooning, drawing circa 1950

Carl Van Vechten (to Gertrude Stein) 1917:  This porcelain tribute was bought cold in some plumber shop…Stieglitz is exhibiting the object at 291 and he has made some wonderful photographs of it.  The photographs make it look like anything from a Madonna to a Buddha.” 

Beatrice Wood: “Mr Mutts fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tub is immoral.  It is a fixture that you see everyday in plumbers show windows.  Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance.  He CHOSE it.  He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.  As for plumbing, that is absurd.  The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”

John Cage on his composition 4’33”, first performed at a benefit concert in Woodstock NY on August 29, 1952:
“I used noises/./They had not been/in-tellectualized;/the ear could hear them/directly/and didn’t have to go through any abstraction/a-bout them/….Noises, too/,/had been dis-criminated against/;/and being American,…I fought/for Noises.”