Sayre2e ch36 integrated_lecture_pp_ts-150677

Copyright ©2012 Pearson Inc.

Aaron. Aspiration. Detail. 1936.

The Harlem Renaissance

What was the Harlem Renaissance?

• “The New Negro” — Edited by Alain Leroy Locke, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro argued that a new era was dawning for black Americans and that Harlem was the center of this new arena of creative expression.

• Langston Hughes and the Poetry of Jazz — According to Hughes, “Negro was in vogue.” He came to understand that his cultural identity rested not in the grammar and philosophy of white culture, but in the vernacular expression of the American black, which he could hear in its music (the blues and jazz especially) and its speech.

• Zora Neale Hurston and the Voices of Folklore — Hurston undertook anthropological field research to collect folklore in the South. Her writing concerned itself primarily with the question of African-American identity—an identity she located in the vernacular speech of the rural South.

• The Quilts of Gee’s Bend — In the isolated community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, an indigenous grassroots approach to textile design flourished. The quilts rivaled in every way the inventiveness and freedom of modern abstract art.

• All That Jazz — By the end of the 1920s, jazz was the American music. The blues are by definition laments bemoaning loss of love, poverty, or social injustice, and they contributed importantly to the development of jazz. The greatest of the 1920s blues singers was Bessie Smith. Dixieland jazz originated in New Orleans including Louis Armstrong. Duke Ellington introduced the term swing to jazz culture.

• The Visual Arts in Harlem — The leading visual artist in Harlem in the 1920s was Aaron Douglas who illustrated “The Prodigal Son.”

• Discussion Question: What does W.E.B. DuBois mean by “double consciousness”?


Carl Van Vechten. Portrait of Countee Cullen in Central Park. 1941.


Jessie T. Pettway. Bars and String-Pieced Columns. 1950s.


Carl van Vechten. Portrait of Bessie Smith. n.d.4" × 5".

Active Listening Guide: L.H. Armstrong: Hotter Than That

MyArtsLabChapter 36 – New York, Skyscraper Culture, and the Jazz Age

http://media.pearsoncmg.com/ph/hss/hss_sayre_thehumanities2_myartslab_Vol_2/active_listening_guide/index.html#sayer2e_alg42_ch36-lg


http://www.learn.columbia.edu/ha/html/ancient_athens_parthExSw.htm

http://www.learn.columbia.edu/ha/related_sites/acropolis_360_public/html/1_5/1.3_01.html

http://www.learn.columbia.edu/ha/html/ancient_athens_parthExW2.htm

http://www.learn.columbia.edu/ha/html/ancient_athens_parthExW.htm

http://www.myartslab.com/

Active Listening Guide: Williams: Florida Bound Blues










Bessie Smith. Musical Notation: Chromatic note change: Florida Bound Blues.

Active Listening Guide: Ellington: It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)










The Cotton Club, Lenox Avenue and 143rd Street, New York City. Early 1930s.

Closer Look: Duke Ellington





Aaron Douglas. “The Prodigal Son,” illustration in James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Sermons in Verse. 1927.


Jacob Lawrence. In the North the Negro had better educational facilities, from The Migration of the Negro (panel 58). 1940-41.

12" × 18”.

Skyscraper and the Machine: Architecture in New York

What is the International Style in Architecture?

• The Machine Aesthetic — The Chrysler Building is a monument to the technology and the spirit of the new that technology inspired. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz championed photographers and painters who were all dedicated to revealing the geometries of the world. Stieglitz believed that in the skyscraper he had discovered the underlying geometry of modernity itself.

• The International Style — The International Style was characterized by an austere, clean modernism that revealed its plain geometries. The label was coined by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Philip Johnson who were the curators of a show called the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture.

• Discussion Question: What is the cult of the machine?


Map: New York City Skyscrapers.

Architectural Simulation: The Skyscraper



William van Alen. Chrysler Building, New York. 1928-30.


Margaret Bourke-White. Chrysler Building: Gargoyle. 1930.12-15/16" × 9-1/4”.


Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage. First published in Stieglitz's Camera Work, 1911. 1907.

13-3/16" × 10-3/8”.


Paul Strand. Abstraction, Porch Shadows. 1916.12-15/16" × 9-5/8”.


Alfred Stieglitz. Looking Northwest from the Shelton, New York. 1932.9-1/2" × 7-9/16”.


Cass Gilbert. Woolworth Building, New York City, elevation sketch. 1910, December 31.


Frank Lloyd Wright. Robie House, South Woodlawn, Chicago, Illinois. 1909.


Frank Lloyd Wright. Robie House, South Woodlawn, Chicago, Illinois: Plan. 1909.


Frank Lloyd Wright. Fallingwater (Kaufmann House), Bear Run, Pennsylvania. 1935-36.

Architectural Panorama: Kaufmann House (Fallingwater, ground floor)

Architectural Panorama: Kaufmann House (Fallingwater, second floor)

Video: Fallingwater


Making It New: The Art of Place

What is suggested by the adage “make it new”?

• The New American Novel and Its Tragic Sense of Place — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is set in New York City and Long Island and illuminates the quintessential American dream represented by crass materialism. Earnest Hemingway wrote about American expatriates but preferred the wilder settings and untamed nature, particularly the lakes and rivers of upper Michigan. William Faulkner created the Southern Novel in his imaginary Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha.

• The New American Poetry and the Machine Aesthetic — Ezra Pound, in his translation of Chinese text, invoked centuries of Chinese tradition in order to underscore the necessity of continual cultural renewal. William Carlos Williams concentrated on the stark presentation of commonplace objects to the exclusion of inner realities. E.E. Cummings celebrates the machine culture and depends on the visual characteristics of capitalization, punctuation, and line endings to

• The New American Poetry and the Machine Aesthetic (Continued) — surprise the reader. Hart Crane believed that the modern poet must “absorb the machine.” For him, the symbol of the machine aesthetic was the Brooklyn Bridge.

• The New American Painting: “That Madam…is paint.” — The new American landscape can be seen in Demuth’s Incense of a New Church which is a deeply ironic commentary on the American worship of machine and manufacture. Marsden Hartley was most influenced by Paul Cezanne. The mountains of New Mexico became a motif for Hartley. Georgia O’Keeffe would become the most famous of the American artists who came into their own in the 1920s and 1930s. Her work was most often described solely in terms of its “female” imagery.

• The American Stage: Eugene O’Neill — It was on stage that both the visual texture of American life and the language of modern America were best experienced. Eugene O’Neill’s plays stress the isolation and alienation of modern life.

• Discussion Question: What do you take to be the meaning of Hemingway’s “Big Two Hearted River”?


William Carlos Williams. Williams's "The Great Figure". 1921.


Charles Demuth. Demuth's The Figure 5 in Gold. 1928.35-1/2" × 30”.


Joseph Stella. The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Brooklyn Bridge (The Bridge). 1920-22.

88-1/2" × 54”.


Charles Demuth. Incense of a New Church. 1921.26-1/4" × 20”.


Charles Sheeler. Classic Landscape. 1931.25" × 32-1/4”.


Marsden Hartley. New Mexico Landscape. 1920-22.30" × 36”.


Georgia O’Keeffe. Red Hills and Bones. 1941.29-3/4" × 40”.

The Golden Age of Silent Film

What characterizes the “golden age” of silent film?

• The Americanization of a Medium — Hollywood came to be the center of the movie industry in part because of weather, the city’s remoteness from the East, and cheap available property.

• The Studios and the Star System — The studio system was an organizational structure of production, distribution, and exhibition within the same company. The most important early stars were Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.

• Audience and Expectation: Hollywood’s Genres — The genres that characterized Hollywood production through the 1950s were comedy; fantasy; adventure; the crime or gangster film; the coming-of-age film; the so-called woman’s film; romantic drama; the horror film; war films; and the western.

• Cinema in Europe — Europeans tended to regard cinema as high art. After the war, some German filmmakers, influenced by Expressionist painters, began to search for ways to similarly express themselves in film. The surrealist film used skillful editing of startling images and effects as a new tool for exploring the unconscious. Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel were the Spanish Surrealists.

• Discussion Question: How did the studio system in Hollywood develop?


The "Hollywoodland" sign. Rebuilt and shortened to "Hollywood" in 1978. 1923.


William Cameron Menzies. Sets for The Thief of Bagdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks. 1924.


Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. 1925.


Douglas Fairbanks. Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad. 1924.


Tom Mix. Tom Mix in The Great K & A Train Robbery. 1926.11" × 17”.


Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. The City, in Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis. 1926.


Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Scene from Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). 1929.


Continuity & Change: The Rise of Fascism: Burning books on the Opernplatz, Berlin, May 10, 1933. 1933.

Sayre2e ch36 integrated_lecture_pp_ts-150677

Education

Transcript of Sayre2e ch36 integrated_lecture_pp_ts-150677