Chapter Fifteen
Decades of
Change
The Plural Self in a Global World
Prelude to War
• The causes of World War II can be traced to the rise of fascism in
Europe, itself attributable to the worldwide economic downturn
caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s
• In Germany, Hitler felt that the forces of modernity were determined
to destroy the German state, specifically under the leadership of
Jewish intellectuals
• The Fascist ideologies that dominated Hitler’s Germany and Italy under
Benito Mussolini spread to Spain by the mid-1930s, resulting in major
uprisings, strikes, and full jails
Pablo Picasso, Guernica
Oil on canvas, 11' 5½"  25' 15¼", 1937
On April 26, 1937, a German air-force squadron bombed the town of Guernica, in northern Spain.
Picasso’s painting commemorating the tragedy would become the international symbol of the
horrors of war and the fight against totalitarianism.
Existentialism
• The Holocaust and the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
dramatically increased the profound pessimism that had gripped
Europeans ever since the turn of the century. How could human
beings exist with the knowledge of what human beings could do?
• French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued for what he termed
existentialism. Humans must define their own essence (who they
are) through their existential being (what they do)
• For Sartre, there is no meaning to existence, no eternal truth to
discover. The only certainty is death
Theater of the Absurd
• Sartre’s play No Exit was the first example of what in the 1960s
became known as the Theater of the Absurd
• Among its chief proponents were Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco,
Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Tom Stoppard
• All of these playwrights share a common existential sense of the
absurd plus, ironically, a sense that language is a barrier to
communication, that speech is almost futile, and that we are
condemned to isolation and alienation
Action Painting
• Due to a style that came to be known as abstraction expressionism, after
the war New York, not Paris, became the center of the art world
• American artist Jackson Pollack developed “action paintings,” in which the
canvas became “an arena in which to act”
• Pollack would drip, pour, and splash paint over the surface of the canvas,
determining the top and bottom of the piece only after the process was
complete
• The result was a galactic sense of space
Jackson Pollock, Number 27
Oil on canvas, 4‘ 1"  8‘ 10", 1950
With works such as this one, Pollack busted our idea of a picture all to hell.
"Pollock's New Painting Technique“
Video will play automatically.
From Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko: Icons of Abstract
Expressionism (length: 3:03). Item #9125
William de Kooning, Excavation
Oil on canvas, 6' 8"  8' 4¼", 1950
• According to de Kooning,
“Every so often a painter has to
destroy painting”
• Excavation is a complex
organization of cream-colored
forms that lead from one to
another
• His primary concern is the
relation of the individual to his
or her environment
Color-Field Painting
• Large paintings of enveloping
color characterize another
approach to abstract
expressionism, a more
meditative and quiet painting
• The scale of these paintings is
intentionally large
• Green on Blue (oil on canvas, 7'
5¼"  5' 3¼", 1956) by Mark
Rothko exemplifies this idea
The Aesthetics of Chance
• Composer John Cage and artist Robert Rauschenberg included
diverse and often random elements in their creations
• Cage and Rauschenberg, with Merce Cunningham, collaborated in
artistic expressions, which, while simultaneous, were not planned or
coordinated in advance
• Alan Kaprow expanded on the concept with multimedia events
called Happenings that increasingly included audience involvement
Mass Media and the
Culture of Consumption
• The 1950s had been an era of unprecedented prosperity in the
United States
• Walt Disney opened Disneyland, sales of household products
exploded, new products proliferated, charge cards were introduced,
and fast-food chains opened their doors
• Television played a key role in marketing these products
• Media, popular sociologist Marshall McLuhan wrote, “create a
society of desire—the desire to possess and consume what we do
not have”
Pop Art
• In the early 1960s, especially in New York, a number of artists created
a “realist” art that represented reality in terms of media—advertising,
television, comic strips—the imagery of mass culture
• James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, and Roy
Lichtenstein were among the first to present literal depictions of
consumer products as legitimate art
• Even as the paintings debunked the idea of originality, their literalness
redefined the American landscape as the visual equivalent of the
supermarket aisle
Andy Warhol
Campbell’s Soup Cans
Marilyn Diptych
1962
1962
Roy Lichtenstein, Oh, Jeff . . .
I Love You, Too . . . But . . . .
Oil on magma on canvas, 4'  4', 1964
• “Feeling” in popular culture is
as “canned” as Campbell’s soup
• “Love” is emptied of real
meaning as the real weight of
the message is carried by the
final “But . . . .”
• The large size of this painting
mirrors the Hollywood screen
and the texture of the common
billboard
The Struggle for Civil Rights
• In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated
schools violate the Constitution. But when 9 African American
students enrolled at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in the
fall of 1957, they were turned away by the state’s National Guard
• By April 1963, the focal point of racial tension and strife had shifted
to Birmingham, Alabama, which in protest over desegregation orders
closed its parks and public golf courses and halted distribution of
food normally given to the city’s needy families
• Groups of protestors descended on the city’s downtown to picket
businesses that continued to maintain “separate but equal” policies
and to take seats at “whites only” lunch counters
Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined in the Birmingham protests
• On April 6, 50 marchers were arrested. The next day, 600 marchers
gathered, and the Birmingham police confronted them with clubs,
attack dogs, and the fire department’s new water hoses, which, they
bragged, could rip the bark off a tree
• On April 12, King was taken into custody and placed in solitary
confinement in the Birmingham jail
The Harlem Renaissance
• The Great Migration, as it was later called, of blacks out of the South
at the outbreak of World War I led to a dynamic new cultural center
of creative expression in Harlem
• Poet Langston Hughes, who had lived in Paris for a while seeking a
freedom he could not find at home, became one of the most
powerful voices in Harlem
• Jazz, which had established itself as the music of African Americans,
by the end of the 1920s was the American music, and it was almost
as popular in Paris and Berlin as it was in New York, Chicago, and New
Orleans
The Feminist Movement
• The feminist movement, like the antiwar and civil rights
movements, came into its own in the early 1960s. Due to “the
Pill,” women gained control over their reproductive functions and
began to express the sexual freedom that men had always taken
for granted
• Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, in which
she rejects modern American society’s cultural construction of a
women
• Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich explore the
existential concept of women in their poetry
• Real change, though, was slow in coming
Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be
naked to get into the Met. Museum?
Poster, 1989
Postmodernism
• In 1966, architect Robert Venturi issued a “Gentle Manifesto” which
offered his criteria for a new eclectic approach to architecture that
abandoned the clean and simple geometrics
• Venuturi and others championed an architecture that would “embody
the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion”
• The collision of styles and forms epitomized by Las Vegas has come to
be called postmodernism
The Architecture of Frank Gehry
• The Los Angeles home of
Frank Gehry, perhaps the
dean of postmodern
architecture, is a new
structure surrounding an
old one
• Gehry established a tension
between the two with
differing materials and
approaches
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
• Gehry’s sculptural use of materials has continued throughout his
career, culminating in his design for the Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao, Spain
• Sculptural in concept, the museum does not blend in to the old town
and its countryside in any way. But its postmodern spirit makes
Bilbao a more interesting city
• The design has been successful, although there were fears that the
building itself would detract from the artwork displayed within
Frank Gehry,
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
1997
Frank Gehry,
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
1997
East/West, North/South
• Western culture has transformed other cultures
• Asian cultures are particularly challenging to postmodern architects
because their cities possess a much greater mix of functions. Tall
buildings rise in the midst of smaller residential structures
• Rem Koolhaas, a leading urban scholar and professor at Harvard
University, has designed one of the most intriguing new projects in
Asia—the headquarters of a Chinese television network, completed for
the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Rem Koolhaus, New Headquarters,
Central Chinese Television CCTV
Yokinori Yanagi, America
Ants, colored sand, plastic boxes, plastic tubes, 1994
•
America is an image of
international cross-fertilization
•
Japanese artist Yanagi filled
each box with colored sand in
the pattern of a national flag
from the nations of North and
South America
•
Ants introduced into the
system immediately began
carrying sand between flags,
transforming and corrupting
their original designs
Yasumasa Morimura,
Portrait (Twins)
Color photograph, 6' 13½"  10', 1988
• Traditionally insular Japan
has recognized artistically the
collision of cultures, of
traditional and contemporary
worlds
• The complex relationship
between East and West and
between male and female is
explored in Yasamasu
Morimura’s Portrait (Twins)
of 1988, which echoes
Manet’s Olympia
Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary
Paper collage, oil paint, glitter, polyester resin,
map pins, and elephant dung on linen
8'  6‘, 1996
• British-born Nigerian artist Ofili
portrays the Virgin as a black
woman, and surrounding her
are putti with bare bottoms
and genitalia cut out of
pornographic magazines
• Two balls of elephant dung
support the painting, and a
third clump defines one of her
breasts. In Yoruba culture,
genitalia and dung are
associated with fertility
Shahzia Sikander, Pleasure Pillars
Watercolor, dry pigment, vegetable color, tea, and ink, 12"  10", 2001
• Pakistani painter Sikander
explores the tensions
inherent in Islam’s encounter
with the Western world
• She portrays herself as a
powerful ram surrounded by
images of East and West
• At the top, a modern fighter
jet roars by