Fine Art vs. Anti-Art: 1917 to 1967

Catalog description

Dr. Wayne Craven writes in American Art: History and Culture, "As the new century opened America was a nation in transition, and ripe for many kinds of revolutions - in politics, social systems, and certainly in literature and painting. [These] social shifting values and forces were occurring within American society at large." Focusing on the 50 years from WWI to Vietnam, this class examines the artistic debates and ideological struggles manifested by American art. During this time, there is a shifting barometric needle of stylistic expression. On one side, we see an entrenched, traditionalist school that retains the noble beaux arts criteria for realism and classical content. Artists to be studied in this school are: Henri, Sloan, Hopper, Marsh, Cadmus, Benton, Curry, Wood, Sheeler, Demuth and Wyeth. On the other side of the aesthetic spectrum, we encounter rebels leading the avant-garde. Sparked by the new "isms" of European modernism, artists to be discussed include: Duchamp, Stella, Dove, O'Keeffe, Gorky, Pollock, Rothko, Frankenthaler, De Kooning, Motherwell. The culmination and convergence of these parallel tracks arrive with the neo-realist but equally avant-gardist Pop art movement of the 1960s. Warhol, Rosenquist, Johns, and Wessleman use hard-edge realism to convey anti-establishment parodies and camp spin-offs of high culture. The period between 1917-1967 becomes, then, the pivotal shift when traditionalism is converted into a new cultural paradigm ending modernism as a distinct period.