This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.

Introduction: the Aesthetic and Ideological Context for Abstraction following the Second World War

  1. Modernism to Postmodernism
  2. Prehistory - the 1930s
    1. Documentary Photography
    2. Leftist Modernism
      1. Social Realism
      2. WPA
      3. Popular Front

    versus

  3. Right wing modernism
    1. Regionalism
    2. "The Silo School"
  4. Modernism midcentury
    1. Form or
    2. Content
  5. Post-modernism's answer = form versus content is a false dichotomy

Slide List

Rothko Number 10 1950
Sherman Untitled #92 1981 (photograph)
Pollock handprints in No. 1 1948
Horn The Little School of Painting 1978 (kinetic sculpture)
Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother 1936
Diego Rivera Motor Assembly 1932
Benton Cotton Pickers 1928
Picasso Guernica 1937
Matisse La Musique 1944

The course will cover the shift from modernist authorial genius, to the postmodernist critique of that genius.

Compare: Jackson Pollock, #1, 1948 and Rebecca Horn, Little Painting School, 1978

Review the move from Social Realism (Diego Rivera, Motor Assembly, 1932) and Regionalism (Thomas Hart Benton, Cotton Pickers, 1928-29).

But explain their continuities with the Abstract Expressionist Generation. (Jackson Pollock, Cotton Pickers, 1934-38)