Modern Print Monday: Alexander Calder

Aubusson tapestry designed by 

Alexander Calder, 1960s

In 1962 Calder designed a group of tapestries to be woven in Aubusson, France, famous for its weaving workshops. They reflect his post World-War II interest in bright colors along with his life-long use of abstracted nature and wire-like forms.

Alexander Calder 1898-1976

American

Calder seems not to have designed repeat pattern although his ideas became popular figures in prints.

Composition 

or 

Quilt

by Alexander Calder

Again we see a modernist influenced by textiles and in return changing the way textiles looked.

 Arc of Petals, 1941

Alexander Calder 

Calder went to Paris in the 1920s where he associated with the surrealists who gave the name Mobiles to his kinetic sculptural pieces crafted from wire and sheet metal. He abstracted nature into graceful, simple shapes that floated on the air.

Small Hours, 1953

Repeating Print By Lucienne Day

His imagery and wire sculpture, so new in the 1930s, were everyday imagery in the 1950s when, according to Lesley Jackson in Twentieth Century Pattern Design, critic James deHolden Stone complained that textile design was limited to three categories: "Modern, Mobiles and Spasms."

Three pieces of  barkcloth from the 1950s

A few abstract shapes and some wire-like lines:

classic midcentury modern.

Read a post on Lucienne Day here:

http://historicallymodernquilts.blogspot.com/2013/05/modern-print-monday-lucienne-day.html

And more about Alexander Calder's later work here:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2012/01/alexander-calder.html

Principles of Modernism: Surrealism

Man Ray

Gift

1921 (reproduction)

Modernism has been subdivided into multiple divisions, either by art historians looking back or by the artists themselves who gathered under umbrellas of particular philosophies. Poet Andre Breton established himself as surrealism's head by publishing the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 Paris.

Man Ray

Ingres' Violin

1924

The Getty Museum

Surrealism was much influenced by Freudian theories of the subconscious and free-association. Visual artists worked to overcome their conscious imagery through techniques such as automatic drawing, free association, and a type of community composition called the Exquisite Corpse (cadavre exquis) in which different artists added to the piece in what quilters would call a Round Robin.

Victor Brauner, Jacques Hérold, Violette Hérold, 

Yves Tanguy, and Raoul Ubac, An Exquisite Corpse drawing 

1938

Meret Oppenheim

Object, 1936

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Meret Oppenheim

Bird Leg Table

Surrealism often featured strange combinations of images, such as Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined tea cup. They could be humorous or unsettling, ironic or confusing---often in combination.

Frida Kahlo

Self Portrait with Monkeys 1940

Rene Magritte

The Empty Mask

1928

Yves Tanguy

Reply to Red

1943

George DiChirico

The Red Tower

1913

Dreams and hallucinations inspired surrealist imagery, which often featured machine-age contraptions that could be impish and threatening at the same time.

Marcel Duchamp

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even

or

The Large Glass

1915-1923

Joan Miro

The Poetess

1940

Like minimalism, surrealism had a lot of rules. In New York in 1941 Breton fired Robert Motherwell from a surrealist publication because he'd sent hand-etched Christmas cards. "[Breton] said he'd been fighting the bourgeoisie all his life and we were vipers in his bosom," recalled another artist who was "just thrown out."

Other artists hated being labeled as surrealists, but then most people dislike being labeled in any way. Whether the artists sought the label or rejected it, their view of the world and consciousness left a lasting legacy.

Two rather surreal pieces of 1950s barkcloth

See an essay about Surrealism on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm

Modern Print Monday: Russel Wright

Symbols by Russel Wright

Russel Wright

(1904-1976)

Few people had more effect on American taste than Russel Wright. He was an industrial designer who revolutionized interior design with his tableware, beginning with "American Modern" for Stuebenville Pottery in 1937. Two years later he began designing for Bauer Pottery.

It was not only the shape but the color that

was so distinctive

Symbols in another colorway.

Particularly the innovative lime green called chartreuse.

The fabric was designed for tablecloths to

coordinate with the dishes.

The plastic version of Wright's tableware

was Brookpark from Melmac.

Wright used nature's colors in a novel combination that 

defined American modernism in the 1950s

Wright's home Manitoga in New York

is open to the public.

Gray,

Chartreuse

Hunter green, pink

And deep red

The perfect 50's dress with fabric inspired

by Wright's signature color scheme.

My collection of Wright-inspired table ware

Symbols in gray with blue

Visit Wright's home, Manitoga:

http://www.russelwrightcenter.org/redesign/home.html

Sentimental Modernism in Quilts

Here we have the classic conflict in 20th century quilts. Is Sunbonnet Sue modern or not modern?

She's abstract; she makes use of modern colors, solids and abstracted floral prints.

Yet, she was never going to make the modern cut in 1930s Paris because she is a sentimentalized image.

If you feel like saying "Ohhhh, isn't that cute," it's sentimentalized. And it's not modern (Remember modernism has a lot of rules.)

She may not be modern but she is popular because she evokes a lot of emotions, mostly having to do with smallness, babies, naivete.

Here's her almost as popular cousin The Colonial Lady

This sentimental pattern doesn't appeal so much to the need to cuddle something cute; rather it's designed to make the viewer nostalgic.

She's a Colonial lady, perhaps answering the need for the authentic Americanism everyone was looking for in  the Colonial Revival of the 1930s. She's dressed in a costume of mixed historical antecedents with a Sunbonnet to remind us of pioneer farmwomen .

Her dress print is quite up-to-date, an abstracted flower.

She's modern yet not-modern

In this version she is dressed more like a Southern belle with hoops skirts, flounces and pantaloons--perhaps nostalgia for the idealized Southern plantation---a Gone With the Wind sentimentality.

Nostalgia wrapped in chiffon.

Well I'm not buying it and neither did the people in my sewing group.

In 1979 we made The Sun Sets on Sunbonnet Sue.

It's been published a lot. Many people interpret it as a feminist comment. We were not commenting on women's rights; we were commenting on art.

NO SENTIMENTALIZATION!

See more of the quilt here at the Museum at Michigan State University, where it resides thanks to a gift from Kitty Clark Cole.

http://www.museum.msu.edu/glqc/collections_2001.158.01.html

Modern Print Monday: Irene Lentz

Irene Lentz's tropical costume for

Ginger Rogers in 1933's Flying Down to Rio

Irene Lentz (1901-1962) succeeded Adrian as MGM's lead costumer

and did over 160 movies as Irene from 1933 to 1962.

This two-color, over-scaled leaf print still looks fresh.

Costumers like Irene and Adrian popularized

modern design with movie goers, one reason

modern prints became the standard in the 1930s.

See a website devoted to Irene Lentz here:

http://www.irene-lentz.com/

Feedsacks a decade or two later.

Sentimentalism and Quilts

Grandma Moses

The Quilting Bee

The conflict between sentimentalism and modernism is intrinsic in the word quilt.

Quilts ARE sentimental. Dropping one into a painting evokes all sorts of sentiment, primarily nostalgia for an imagined rural life of female domesticity.

Bob Pettes

The Quilting Bee

Morgan Weistling

The Quilting Bee

It's hard to overcome the connection, which is why some textile artists refuse to use the word quilt to describe their art.

Robert Rauschenberg

Bed, 1955

Collection of the Museum of Modern Art

But you can also work with that sentimentality to "Épater la bourgeoisie" (Shock the Middle Class) as Robert Rauschenberg did when he created a sensation by painting on his sheets and bedquilt and mounting the bed on a gallery wall.

Robert Rauschenberg ,Credit Blossom (Spread) 1978

Collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art

Here is another of his "combines" incorporating a quilt.

The museum caption tells us it is:

"Solvent transfer, quilt, and other fabrics on paperboard applied to gessoed wood panel 84 x 108 x 2 in."

See a giant picture here by clicking on the photo on the Museum's web page. 

http://artnc.org/works-of-art/credit-blossom-spread