ART 31B Study Guide - Final Guide: Tina Modotti, Piet Mondrian, Max Kozloff
1. Compare the ways these two works either liken art to labor or differentiate it from labor.
What role does the format, content, and style of the work play in this association or
differentiation? In the case of Rivera, discuss both this particular panel as well as the
whole mural that it is a part of. [Clement Greenberg, Walter Benjamin, Max Kozloff,
Tatiana Flores, SOTPE Manifesto to support your claims]
*Define labor as having two components (mass & complexity)
Context / Introduction
- Full Fathom, Jackson Pollock
- How did modernism rise? (Institutions for Modern Art, Emigration of European
Artists to the states, The destruction of Europe, New deal program,
McCarthyism→trying to repudiate itself from it)
- [SAME IDEA FROM QUESTION 3]
- Mural by Diego Rivera
- A shift from cubism. Going towards telling stories. Great involvement in politics
- Needed to communicate to a mass illiterate audience, so choose to do murals so
large exposure and people understand. Displaying what is important → Labor’s
desire to overthrow. Making art with a purpose.
- “Pure art is sentimental crap for the capitalist class to control aesthetic production
and deprive it of any expression that may be useful to the exploited and the
oppressed”
Form
- Full Fathom
- Its surface is clotted with an assortment of detritus, from cigarette butts to coins
and a key. a large part of the paint's crust was applied by brush and palette knife,
creating an angular counterpoint to the weaving lines. → purpose is to complicate
the surface texture. (can make comparison between side and front view)
- Layers over layers
- Mural
- Part of a larger mural piece in the ministry of public education in Mexico City
- Large → likens art to labor
- In terms of stylistic feature, tries to draw people’s faces. Humanizing the figures
(different approach to Tina Modotti but) trying to achieve the same goal. (as if
trying to give the people a voice by drawing faces)
Content
- Full Fathom
- Unrecognizable forms. Extremely dark in choice of color with hints of brightness.
- Full fathom five name comes from The Tempest (shakespeare). Like the plot of
the work, follows a rather dark theme. Shown in color of the work.
- Mural
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- Focuses on portraying the civil wars in action. Woman handing out guns, people
shooting shots in the trench. In many ways similar to the idea of a propaganda.
- Depicting the political turmoil going on in Mexico. No longer class hierarchy,
everyone's the same. Depiction is detailed.
Style
- Full Fathom
- broke up the rigid, shallow space of Cubist pictures, and replaced it with a dense
web of space, like an unfathomable galaxy of stars. The idea of aesthetic
autonomy.
- Similar to the mural in that it’s hard to replicate.
- Mural
- Extremely clear in depiction
- aesthetic aim is to socialize artistic expression, to destroy bourgeois
individualism.
- Likens art to labor. Signs of collaboration. Significant because implying both the
collaboration in making the art and in civil war.
Both
- Both in terms of style and content follows the idea that it’s hard to replicate. So tries to
liken art to labor.
2. In what ways can Piet Mondrian’s 1922 Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue and
Jackson Pollock’s No.1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), be seen as both self-referential and imply
meanings beyond the artwork’s own literal properties? Are these two aspects in
contradiction with one another or not?
Context / Introduction
- Piet Mondrian
- From drawing figurative items to an extreme dilution. Large emphasis on the idea
of comparing binary.(Vertical vs Horizontal, positive vs negative, colored or
white)
- He simplified the subjects of his paintings down to the most basic elements, in
order to reveal the essence of the mystical energy in the balance of forces that
governed nature and the universe.
Form
- Piet Mondrian
- In the most foundational level, its form is trying to act as an upgrade in the path
of modernism (upon first sight). But looking more closely at the color composition
and the black lines, it further tries to imply meaning beyond the artwork’s own
literal properties.
- Two ways form dictates and imply artwork’s literal properties
- Spatial: grid states the autonomy of the artwork (flattened, geometrized)
- Temporal: an emblem of modernity. At the forefront of art during the
century
- Jackson Pollock
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