Mary Leriche     

Development of Modern Art:

Post 3

At the Newark Museum there is an exhibition called Angels and Tomboys that is currently showing. One of the artworks that are depicted is called Height of Fashion, created by Lily Martin Spencer in the year 1854, and is a lithograph. During this time American art was starting to more noticed and popular. Many American artists became famous for their depiction of what was going on in America during this time, like with the expansion of settlers into the west.

The lithograph is a black and white satiric print of an African-American girl with a pet dog in her lap, fake monocle and a finger extended pretending to be fashionable. She is wearing a hat, necklace, and her dress extends off her shoulders. Both the girl and the dog are looking at the viewer. The artist poked fun at the pretentiousness of the child and the trappings and mannerisms associated with high society. Lily Martin Spencer was instrumental in popularizing girlhood imagery in the mid-1850’s, when this theme became increasingly accepted in American art. Her lithographs were mass produced and distributed to an expanding middle class hungry for inexpensive prints with accessible subjects that could be used for home decoration.

The second artwork that will be discussed is called The Lovers, which was created by Rene Magritte. It was made in 1928 and is an oil on canvas painting. Magritte was one of the Surrealist painters, he had formulated within his own more commonplace system of visual images another strategy for evoking the new Surrealist reality, in which the normal associations of objects, images, and their names dissolved in a scheme of identities whose rules were still to be fathomed and reconstructed.

In The Lovers, there are two people, a woman and a man, kissing each other, but they have their heads covered by a piece of cloth. The cloth completely obscures them from each other. They are wearing formal clothing, and they are centrally located and take up most of the composition. Magritte’s conviction sometimes led toward the erotic, even the gruesome of sadistic in the subject matter of his work. “In my pictures I showed objects situated where we never find them. They represented the realization of the real, if unconscious, desire existing in most people (Magritte)” (Hunter 185).

Both of these works are a comment on what people consider important, or what they do. The first work by Spencer is a comment on society’s view of what they consider important- fashion. The second work by Magritte is a comment on the eroticism of humans, and how they overlook of do not see certain things that are right in front of them. In Height of Fashion, Spencer comments on the role of women, how fashion is considered such an important part of their gender, and the absurdity of the importance that is placed on it. In Magritte’s work The Lovers, he depicts gender by the interaction between males and females and the sexual desires that everyone feels. Surrealism was one of the art movements around the beginning of the 20^th century that would lead to Modernism, which became an art movement out of Switzerland and made its way to America. Part of it was about creating art with the least amount of things, keeping the design clean, and it still being art.

Newark Museum Website


Sources:

Modern Art by Sam Hunter, John Jacobus, and Daniel Wheeler

The Information plague next to the artwork in the Newark Museum
Google Images