Assignment II
Twentieth Century Artist
Writing Assignment #2
Art History II Seif
Due: Monday, December 1, 2003
Your final writing assignment is to select an artist to research from
the list provided. You may want to take a look at Chapter 34 of your text,
Gardner’s Art Through The Ages to help you select an artist to research.
Try finding out about an artist you are not already familiar with. The
investigation into their work may lead to some interesting discoveries.
In this paper you will need to provide some general background information
about the artist and analyze a work by this artist.
Here are some things you should consider addressing in your paper.
Provide a biography on the artist. Where are they from? When were they
born? Where did they receive their training or schooling? What are they
doing now? Talk about significant events, places or people that are linked
to this artist.
Provide some connection of how the artist fits into the time period he/she
was working in.
Give a summery of visual conventions that would help you to identify this
artist’s work. What is their trademark? What techniques or images
are frequently used by this artist? Is there a particular attitude or
philosophy that is favored by this artist that is apparent in their art?
Be sure to provide the title, media, size and dates for the work or works
you analyze in the paper. (This piece must be something other than one
found in our textbook.) How does the work of art you are analyzing fit
into the artist’s life?
How does the work compare to other art being done at the same time? How
does the work fit into the artistic movement the artist is classified
in or does it? Which artistic movement does the artist fit into?
You must research this artist beyond what is available to you in our textbook.
Most of the material from sources should be paraphrased, put into your
own language. You can include statements and quotations by the artist
or art critics in your paper if you find their quotes important to your
research. You must make it clear which ideas are yours and which come
from sources. Failure to cite sources is consider plagiarism. At the end
of the essay on a separate sheet, include a list of works cited. If you
only have two sources one of them cannot be your textbook and only one
can be an Internet source. If you use a book as a source you need to provide
the author’s name, Title, publisher, and date of publication. For
a magazine be sure to provide the full title of the magazine, author,
title of the article, date and page number. For an online source you want
to record the information that would allow that source to be located and
the date you accessed the
source.
This paper should be four pages double-spaced with no larger than one-inch
margins.
List
of Artists
|
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Francis Bacon
Louise Bougeois
Judy Chicago
Chuck Close
Jean Dubuffet
Helen Frankenthaler
Leon Golub
Guerrilla Girls
Richard Hamilton
Duane Hanson
Eva Hesse
Jasper Johns
Donald Judd
Anselm Kiefer
Joseph Kosuth
Le Corbusier
Morris Louis
Barnett Newman
Nam June Paik
Jackson Pollock
Faith Ringgold
Mark Rothko
Julian Schabel
Richard Serra
David Smith
Tony Smith
Frank Stella
Jean Tinguety
|
Bill Viola
Robert Arneson
Joseph Beuys
Sandro Chia
Christo & Jeanne Claude
Willem De Kooning
Aubrey Flack
Alberto Giacometti
Michael Graves
Hans Haacke
David Hanimons
Michael Heizer
Jenny Holzer
Philip Johnson
Ellsworth Kelly
Jeff Koons
Barbara Kruger
Roy Lichtenstein
Louise Nevelson
Claes Oldenburg
Adrian Piper
Robert Rauschenberg
Susan Rothenberg
Eero Saarinen
Miriam Schapiro
Cindy Sherman
Kiki Smith
Robert Smithson
Mark Tansey
Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe |
Ludwig Miës van der Rohe
and the Seagram Building
Architecture:
Seagram Building (1958),
375 Park Avenue, New
York, NY
Architects:
Ludwig Miës van der Rohe (1896-1969)
Philip
Johnson (1906- )
If you have ever traveled through or lived in a medium-
to large-sized American city, chances are you have noticed or visited
one of those “glass boxes” that are so much a part of the skylines now
– a steel-framed glass office or apartment tower complex. The
buildings of this type are representative of an architectural movement
known as the “International Style,” which flourished not only here in
this country, but practically world-wide in the decades following World
War II until the late-seventies.
[1]
The recognized master of this style and certainly
one of its founders was the German expatriate, Ludwig Miës van der Rohe.
[2]
Miës van der Rohe was born Maria Ludwig Miës, the son of
a stone mason in 1896 at Aachen
[3]
, a town with a long medieval history on the border of
the German Rhineland and the Low
Countries. Upon reaching adulthood he added his mother’s
maiden name to his surname of Miës. His
death in 1969 at the age of 73 closed a long career as one of the most
renowned and influential architects of the twentieth century.
Despite
the lack of a strictly formal education in architecture, Miës helped
to establish the principles of the International Style’s architectural
vocabulary in a canon that can best be summed up with his famous dictum,
“less is more.”
[4]
Those principles, reductionism and functionalism,
reduce a building’s architecture to a stark simplicity and base its
design strictly on its function.
[5]
The Seagram Building in New York (1958) which he designed in collaboration with architect
Philip Johnson, constitutes a paradigm of this style
[6]
and the epitome of his achievements in corporate
architecture (Chicago’s Farnsworth House (1945-50) being the parallel
achievement in residential architecture.) In
this style, the grid system of the underlying structural components
predominates, revealed in the terse, sparse vertical thrust of rectangular
planes whose forms follow the underlying functionality of the building.
Glass and metal infill panels span the spaces between the structural
steel grid supports creating non-load-bearing “curtain walls”
[7]
– an integrated pattern that is both dynamic and
rhythmic while supporting the weight of the building, flooding the interior
with light, and reflecting light to the exterior from the glass.
The
need of the corporate world for an architecture that had a universal
appeal and adaptability along with an expression of modernity reflecting
the new postwar world order, was satisfied in skyscrapers and towers
like the Seagram Building. As a result,
during the three decades after the war, “Miesian” boxes proliferated
across our cities’ skylines. Although
the International Style is more associated with its postwar corporate
building boom, actually its roots are found in the modern stylizations
prior to World War II and in Miës’ own architectural development as
an apprentice, architect, and finally director of the Bauhaus in the
1930’s.
The
Bauhaus, an institution founded in Germany after the end of World War
I to “help rebuild the country and form a new social order,”
[8]
emphasized “principles of Classical architecture
in their most pure form: without ornamentation of any kind.”
[9]
In the 1920’s Miës had done a series of drawings
“that depicted steel and glass skyscrapers (Friedrichstrasse, Berlin),”
[10]
and in 1929 designed Germany’s pavilion at the International
Exposition in Barcelona, Spain as a modernist masterpiece that garnered
him considerable acclaim.
As
director of the Bauhaus he continued in this philosophical and stylistic
direction until the institution was disbanded by the Nazis. Along with
other Bauhaus teachers and leaders Miës emigrated to the United States where he accepted a post at the fledgling Illinois Institute
of Technology in Chicago
to develop its architectural program.
Concurrently, the 1932 volume “The International
Style” by Philip Johnson and historian and critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock,
thusly termed this Bauhaus style of architecture in America as disseminated by these leaders.
[11]
Miës’
commission for the 39-story Seagram Building as administrative headquarters for the corporation bearing
the Seagram name was the most prestigious awarded to him up to that
time.
[12]
By the mid-fifties he was already internationally
recognized from his association with IIT and a considerable oeuvre of
International Style projects, but was without a “signature” building
in New York.
[13]
Subsequently, his selection as architect for
the project gave him an opportunity to display his vision on America’s foremost architectural stage.
Situated
on one of New
York’s most prime sites on Park Avenue, the slim rectangular box of the Seagram Building straddles the block between 52nd and 53rd
Streets with its front elevation facing west, the first skyscraper of
glass walls from floor to ceiling.
[14]
Set back 90 feet from Park Avenue on an elevated granite piazza with reflecting pools on each side, the
building’s first floor is raised 24 feet above the piazza on “legs”
– the steel columns that support the structure.
In a continuous sweep from the first floor to the roof, an array
of vertical hand-rubbed bronze window mullions spans the width of each
elevation. Projecting outwards from the bronze-tinted glass
panels, they cast a light and shadow that has been compared to the Ionic
columns of Classical architecture.
Considered the crown jewel of the International Style,
the Seagram Building embodies an enduring regal elegance. The building’s pleasing proportions, the richness
of its materials, and the soaring verticality of its structural grid
encapsulates it (in the words of architectural critic Paul Goldberger)
as a “masterpiece (that) appear(s) to rise alone into the sky, as
its architect intended it to do.”
[15]
Note: New construction of nearby buildings and additions
to the Seagram tower itself have changed the unique siting of the tower
in its integration with the New York cityscape as
envisioned by Miës van der Rohe: He “designed the Seagram Building to be a freestanding
monument, best to be viewed in pristine isolation.”
[16]
Daniel J. Bornt, Champaign,
IL, November, 2003
Text body word count: 949
References:
[1]
Website: Dr. Tom Paradis, Northern Arizona Univ.,
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~twp/architecture/international
[2]
Martin Pawley, Introd. and Notes, Miës
van der Rohe, Library of
Contemporary Architects (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970)
[5]
Website: Arapahoe
Acres Historic District, http://www.arapahoeacres.org/international_style.htm
[6]
“A Personal Testament” by Philip Johnson, p. 111,
The Verbatim Record of a Symposium Held at the School of Architecture,
Columbia University, March-May 1961, Four Great Makers of Modern
Architecture, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Miës van der Rohe, Wright
(New York: De Capo Press, 1970)
[7]
Jürgen Tietz, The Story of Architecture of the
20th Century (Cologne: Könemann, 1999), p. 60
[8]
Website: What You Need to Know About, http://architecture.about.com/library/blgloss-bauhaus.htm
[10]
Website: Personal webpage of Andreas
Angelidakis, (CV: Master of Science in Advanced Architectural
Design, Columbia University, New
York), http://www.angelidakis.com/theory/intl.htm
[11]
Website: What
You Need to Know About, http://architecture.about.com/library/blgloss-bauhaus.htm
[12]
Martin Pawley, Introd. and Notes, Miës van der
Rohe, Library of Contemporary Architects (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1970), p. 127
[13]
Website: The
Midtown Book, The Seagram Building, http://www.thecityreview.com/park375.html
[14]
Sidney LeBlanc, Whitney
Guide 20th Century American Architecture, A Traveler’s
Guide to 220 Key Buildings, Revised and Expanded 2nd
Ed., (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1996), p. 105
[15]
Paul Goldberger, On the Rise, Architecture and
Design in a Postmodern Age,
(New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 51
[16]
Sidney LeBlanc, Whitney
Guide 20th Century American Architecture, A Traveler’s
Guide to 220 Key Buildings, Revised and Expanded 2nd
Ed., (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1996), p. 105
Note: All websites accessed 16 Nov. 2003
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