- 1929 - Wall street crash
-1930 - dust bowls
- Culturally jobless, big industries went down
- Government provided relief package - started to rebuild America by providing jobs, homes, ect… employed artists to paint ‘feel good’ paintings to provide for swimming pools, post offices, flats, schools. No freedom to paint freely.
- 1940 - government controlled everything including art - was not able to paint anything that is remotely related to the enemy (russia/communism)
- Artists had enough of the controller and decided to paint/draw their own art form that could not be read and that was abstract expressionism
- Action painting - physical expression - splatting paint - wheeling chair over it - in control of the action painting
- Colour-field painting - exploring your emotions through big expanses of colour - therapeutic
Graphic Design
- Two main influences - Modernism - Bau House
- Max Bill - founded ULM SCH of design - Swiss painter - architect and graphic designer
- Anton Stankowski - developed original graphic design
- Armin Hoffman - Swiss designer - started in 1947
History of photography
- After WW2 was marked by its differences than rather similarities - atomic bomb - war vietnam - american dream - white goods
- Russia under communism was claiming its empire across europe and cuba - cold war begun
- East meets west - trying to capture unique -honest documentation of hope and despondency - photojournalism - influenced by photographer like ansel adams - vivian miayers
- The american dream - 1950’s - doing well financially - making new technical advances in home and leisure - white goods - matching cabinets in kitchen
- Robert frank - captured american dream in the diner and milkshake bars
Ernest Withers
Ernest C. Withers was an American photojournalist. He is best known for capturing over 60 years of African American history in the segregated South, with iconic images of the Montgomery Bus Boycott etc.
Memphis strike, 1968: Ernest Withers’s image of sanitation workers with the sign “I Am a Man.”
Bruce Davidson
Bruce Landon Davidson is an American photographer. He has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities usually hostile to outsiders.
The Selma March, Alabama, 1965
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus was an American photographer. Although Arbus's most famous subjects were outsiders such as transgender people, strippers, carnival performers, nudists, dwarves, and other marginalized people, she was equally drawn to subjects as ordinary as children, mothers, couples, old people, and middle-class families.
Diane Arbus, Lady Bartender at Home with a Souvenir Dog, New Orleans L.A. 1964
British Design
- Produced some memorable propaganda posters - graphic design was trying to find its feet as a separate art - typography - illustration
- Harry Beck designed the london tube map
Edward McKnight Kauffer
Pop art
50s and 60s
Andy warhol - mass produced lino prints
Roy lichtenstein - benday dots was created by him - inspired by adverts and american experience as well as vietnam war
Tom wesselmann - plastic image of graphic design - like to work with nude - ‘great nude’
Jasper johns - ‘the flag’ was best known of him - paint expressionist abstract
Robert rauschenberg - multi artist - didn’t come from a rich family - puts fabric into his painting to remember his childhood
- New technologys ‘the pill’ ‘space race’
- Fashion photography was big in the 60s
- Lewis Morley - likes to photograph Christine Keeler
- Richard Avedon - vogue, life magazine
- David bailey - Jean Shrimpton - film ‘blowup’
- Pop art fashion - optical illusion
- Richard Hamilton - pop art in the UK - rebelling against pop art culture and is against abstract art
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/arts/design/17withers.html
https://www.lomography.com/magazine/330231-bruce-davidson-a-retrospective-on-humanist-photography
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/diane-arbus-5271/three-images-diane-arbus