Theme and Variations: Manhattan Bridge Loop

1921
Theme and Variations
Relating Music and Art
Curated by Becky Reilly

Edward Hopper, Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928



World War I was a turning point in modern warfare and international relations that shook both Europe and the United States.  The end of empire loomed and international tensions increased.  But a world a "Jazz age," as F. Scott Fitzgerald would have it, of opulence and new industry followed the war's conclusion.  Countries were forced to undergo rapid scientific change during the war years, rapidly constructing new industries that would dominate the postwar world.  Some, famously Fitzgerald himself and T.S. Eliot, despaired at the modern world, watching traditions die and lower moral standards form around a factory-based society.  But others, like Gershwin, seemed to look toward the future with hope in the face of economic prosperity.  The microcosm displaying both views was in New York City, which had both an active art scene and a geographically close industrial district.  To interpret New York was to interpret the era.

Edward Hopper's Manhattan Bridge Loop shows a lonely figure walking past a building complex, nearly blending into the wall behind him.  The windows on the buildings look empty and dark, and the buildings themselves are either violently red or cast into shadow.  The result is an unrealistic, uncomfortable color palate that increases the painting's tension.  Its conflict is in its isolation.  The person, probably a surrogate for Hopper himself, lives in a populous, thriving city and yet cannot find a single companion.  He suggests that this new postwar New York of material wealth estranges people from one another.

George Gershwin offers praise to this changed city and world.  He thought up every theme for his "Rhapsody in Blue" while on a train ride, hearing the wheels click and turn.  He finished most of the piece except for the piano line, instead writing a note for the conductor to nod to him.  During the premiere, he improvised throughout the missing section and, after the audience applauded, proceeded to write what he had just played.  The music itself shows a mix of classical concepts and jazz infusions.  It modulates through the circle of fifths but in reverse order and is littered with blue notes.  It has passages of both structured ragtime (3:25) and playful rubato (7:11).  Gershwin creates a graceful if not a bit rag-tag transition from classical themes to modern ones and still draws inspiration from the industrial world and New York City.  Hopper and Gershwin differ about whether humanity is preserved in this bold new consumer society.

  • 7:00 AM

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

1907
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

Hey, ladies.

Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Ladies of Avignon) depicts five unconventionally-painted prostitutes, subjects from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó in Barcelona.  (The title comes from that street name, not the French city.)  The painting has a study of the human form accentuated by a small, central still-life.  Although he completed the first draft in 1907, he repainted the two rightmost heads after a breakup with a lover and did not exhibit the completed piece until 1916.  His display was met with fervent criticism as he was accused of destroying the human and womanly forms, reducing them to crude, unfeminine shapes.

 Picasso drew inspiration from various sources of art from across time.  The composition and poses are reminiscent of post-Impressionist Cézanne's The Bathers.  The ladies' confrontational manner is supplanted from Manet's Olympia.  Between 1906 and 1909, after his Rose Period, Picasso modeled many of his works after African indigenous art, such as the mask above from the Dogon people of central Mali.  The faces of the three women on the left are instead interpretations of Iberian masks, with large, triangular noses and almond-shaped eyes.  (As hideous as art critics thought that the Demoiselles d'Avignon were, their facial features actually indicated feminine beauty in different cultures.)  The still-life of fruit is an exercise that many painters performed, but in Picasso's painting, it creates a lush feeling, the curvaceous fruit juxtaposed with the angular, unusually-formed women.

I chose this painting as a blog subject because it demonstrates techniques of early Cubism (proto-Cubism).  Cubist theory stems in part from an assertion by Cézanne that the shapes of natural objects could be reduced to cylinders, spheres, and cones.  New postulations in science about the nature of time, like Einstien's Theory of Relativity, influenced artistic visions.  Cubists often strove to evoke contemporaneity in simultaneous but different perspectives of the same subject.  At the same time, others sought to make their works seem like an incidental, miraculous intersection of many planes, a goal that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon appears to match more closely.  Beyond the techniques that distorted conventional shapes and viewpoints, cubists still wanted a unity across the canvas, as Les Demoiselles does with complimentary colors and neutral shadows and accents.  The painting marked a transition into a new and influential period of modern art that questioned standard perceptions of time, beauty, and form, trying to find the most basic possible representation of humans.

  • 7:00 AM

Guernica

Guernica
To Those Which They Never Turned Another Cheek: 
Admiration for Paintings with Major Authority Issues 
Curated by Shweta Vadlamani 
Guernica, Picasso, 1937

History required power. Precedents were set by people who wielded that power. There was one point of time when people believed that the enthroned were the only ones who could oppose the forces of society to make a change. I now proceed to write about the artistic voices who actively refuted that claim. 

“This bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.”
 –Pablo Picasso

To summarize it in one word, Guernica speaks of a tragedy. Piccasso’s self-expressed “abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death” is most evident in the tears and mortified postures of the painting’s protagonists. The painting was created as a direct reminder of the bombing of Guernica, Basque country, a Nazi bombardment. German and Italian forces massacred the small Spanish village by mercilessly firebombing the unsuspecting visitors, and making the staggering death rates a terrifying example of why Spain should fear Nazi contempt.

The Spanish government commissioned Picasso to paint a mural in memory of the attack during the pinnacle of the Spanish Civil War. Officially revealed on April 26, 1937, Picasso’s masterpiece was to act as a brutal reminder of how drastically brutal a war can become.

The less-than-censored screams of the painting’s civilians, coupled with the crying bull, representative of Spain’s remorse regarding the tragedy, emphasizes Picasso’s plea for the Spanish populations to stop their fighting.

The painting’s attack upon children and women, who in Picasso mind composed the epitome of human’s perfection, shows the artist’s perception of war as emblematic of mankind’s central, most fatal flaw.

Picasso’s mural created a general feeling of uneasiness regarding war, effectively sparking a cultural campaign against the Spanish Civil War, while also maintaining that same sentiment years later.

At a 2003 United Nations conference that was being held in New York City, journalists claim that the Bush Administration had a blue curtain cover the UN building's tapestry version of Picasso’s Guernica, to strengthen the motivations of the U.S. diplomats who argued for war on Iraq.

  • 12:00 AM