Today's class at the MFA will focus on modernist art. We'll begin with the Special Exhibition From Paris To Provincetown: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut, and then move to other American artists who were Fitzgerald's contemporaries. If time allows, we'll move upstairs to the European modernists who make the transition from impressionism to cubism.

For Critical Response 2, choose a painting, print, or scultpure that expresses a theme, idea, belief, or characteristic in The Great Gatsby. Give an analysis of the artwork that explains how it says something similar to an aspect of Gatsby.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERNISM:
self-conscious questioning of all social and moral values
"Make it new."
Interest in perception
determination to work creatively with fragmentation (from Cubism to montage)
self-conscious manipulation of the conventions of art itself
themes of alienation and incompleteness
fascination with time and space

some topics to think about
portraits (visual representations of people & Fitzgerald's descriptions of characters)
the crowd/individualism
making women's bodies and lives into commodities
the "gaze" in Gatsby, advertising, and art
New York and "modern life"
foreground and background (in paintings and in descriptions)
tension between nostalgia and progress
landscape
interior and exterior
attention to details ("so much depends upon a red wheel barrow"–Williams)
modernist metaphors (Pound's "Petals on a wet, black bough")
tension between holding a romantic ideal and a modern cynicism
duplicity of modern life
tension between accurate representation of reality and modernist distortion

WORKS AT THE MFA FEATURED ON THEIR WEBSITE AT: http://www.mfa.org/handbook/section.asp?s=9&p=1

Blanche Lazzell Provincetown Back Yards, 1926
Pablo Picasso Standing Figure, 1908; Head of a Woman, 1909 (bronze); Portrait of a Woman, 1910
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Reclining Nude, 1909
Oskar Kokoschka Two Nudes (Lovers), about 1912–13
Alfred Stieglitz A Portrait: Georgia O'Keefe, 1918
Geogia O'Keeffe White Rose with Larkspur, No. 2, 1927
Edward Hopper Drug Store, 1927
Charles Sheeler View of New York, 1931
Joseph Stella Old Brooklyn Bridge, about 1941

Web Resources: our modernism webpage: http://classes.berklee.edu/llanday/spring02/jazzage
MFA: http://www.mfa.org
QUESTIONS? E-mail me at llanday@berklee.edu