1. Leftover from last session: Examining the exam…
Q 1: How does Lewis Hine’s photograph, Steamfitter, 1920 represent social attitudes to progress?
Note: This is an example of a “Question 1” from a past HSC Paper. You would have 10 minutes to answer it, and it would be worth 5 marks.
What is the question asking us? It’s asking us how Hine has represented his world in this image. How he has described his world, at that time and place. What the prevailing feeling about progress was, from his perspective. This doesn’t mean everyone felt that way – they obviously didn’t. But this was the world he was representing.
So it relates to a worldview, an attitude, at a certain time and place. This is CULTURAL FRAME stuff.
Citation tells us stuff: They are American, early 20th century people.
What do we know about Modernity? All about progress; change; the power of the machine. A sense that anything is possible because of technology.
We may recall our ‘Shearing the Rams’ image from not so much earlier than this (1899 or so). Remember how the idea of hard work with the technology of the time was romanticised? Do you see any similarities with this image?
SCALE;
PATTERN or SHAPE – the way the figure is in harmony with the shape of the machine behind him. There is a HARMONY
TREATMENT OF THE FIGURE – idealised. It IS a real figure, of course, but the musculature of the man has been highlighted with the lighting and set-up.
ART FORM OR MEDIUM USED;
The figure in art has not only been used simply as a body. It can also be also used to represent a world. A body can be a symbol of humanity generally; or of an emotion or an idea.
This question is asking us to consider the work using The CULTURAL FRAME.
Remember, the Cultural Frame uses time and place to consider a work.
Hine has represented his world in a certain way. He is representing ‘social attitudes to progress’.
Lewis Hine, 1874 –1940, USA, Steamfitter, Gelatin silver print, 24.2 cm ×17.8 cm.

2. Tom Roberts (Australian, 1856 – 1931)Shearing the Rams, , oil on canvas On composition board, 122 x 183cm

3. THE BODY IV – CUBES & COLLAGES
Artists have always been influenced by other artists. Using our Conceptual Framework,
we could say that the ‘world’ of an artist includes work by other artists, because
artists are always looking at art. In this course we have seen artists referring to
earlier art.
<< Eduard Manet,
Olympia, 1863
>>> Titian, Venus
of Urbino, 1538
<<Courbet, Burial at Ornans,
>>>example of a frieze from a Classical Roman building

4. Likewise, the art of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in France between was very influential. They started the Movement called Cubism. Picasso and Braque were themselves influenced by the art of ‘primitive’ cultures that the French had colonised, such as Africa.
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) 1907, oil on canvas, 244 x 234 cm
Georges Braque (French, 1882 – 1963) Big Nude, , oil on canvas, 140 x 101cm
Flat; flat; flat. The perspective is gone.
Everything is kind of broken up like broken glass. The figures are distorted and made into planes and blocks. There almost no modelling at all.
Our attention is drawn to the patches of colour; and the shapes of those patches.
The ‘negative space’ becomes more apparent to us.
The surface becomes more important as the depth of the painting shrinks.

5. Why this fragmentation
Why this fragmentation? It was inspired by other artists, other cultures, and also the Modern city, with bits of structures visible all around us: bright colours; signage; sky scrapers; photographs of scenes taken from aircraft, which was a new thing early in the 20th century.
An influence on the Cubists: Paul Cezanne,
Portrait of a Farmer, , oil on canvas,
64 x 54cm
One could ask, just how important was realism and naturalism and illusion to these artists? Not at all. They were more interested in the artwork as an object in itself, rather than as an illusion of the world.
It’s not really so much about the bargeman, or the seated nude. It’s more about how the artwork actually comes together in itself, for itself. This was a step further towards abstraction.
Fernand Léger (French, 1881–1955)
The Bargeman, 1918, oil on canvas, 49 x 54 cm)

6. Duchamp’s work was influenced by Cubist ideas.
Marcel Duchamp (France 1887 – 1968) Nude descending a staircase No. 2, 1912, oil on canvas, 147 x 89cm
Duchamp’s work was influenced by Cubist ideas.
He was also inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge, who did many studies of humans and animals in motion in the late 19th cent (before the invention of the movie camera.) Each image is from a still camera, a whole bunch of them firing in sequence. These images allowed people to see clearly for the first time how we move in space. It also proved for the first time that a horse at full gallop actually has all 4 feet off the ground at some stage.
Youtube clip on Duchamp?
So this is weird and another step – it’s trying to describe human movement. Rather than a frozen image of a person in an active pose, it’s a combination of images merged together, which is something like ‘stop-motion photography’.

7. Apart from their Cubism, Picasso and Braque broke new ground with another artmaking technique which is now totally common and widespread: collage. Collage (literally, “glueing”) was a radical step. It involved using some other medium – here, scraps of newspaper – and gluing them onto the support (that is, the material that the artwork was created upon.) What effect does this have – this sticking different stuff on to the surface of an artwork?
This goes even further to destroy any illusion within the work. We simply cannot ignore the surface. We become more and more aware of the surface and the fact that we are looking at an object – the art object.
This cubism and collaging made the work more and more abstract. It is not a man with a hat and a violin. It is some form of representation, or sign of a man with a hat and a violin, just like the words ‘man with a hat and a violin’ is a sign of the fact. It is not the thing, it is a sign of the thing. It’s not pretending to be the thing. It’s not interested in pretending, or in illusion. It’s a sign or an interpretation of a man with a hat and a violin.
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) Man with a Hat and a Violin, 1912, newspaper, charcoal, on two joined sheets of paper 125 x 48 cm

8. Collage involves gluing paper, textiles, wallpapers, bus tickets or even objects onto the 2-D surface of an artwork. Cubism AND collage both had the effect of flattening the depth of the painting, so that the surface of the work becomes more apparent. Cubism and collage worked in together.
What is happening with this image? Typically for cubism, we are seeing SOME illusionistic elements – - we can see into the coffee cups, or ALMOST into them. But then we get tipped out again. There is this ongoing confusion between what angle we are at, and how we should address the surface of the work. Do we ‘ignore’ it and pretend that we are looking through a window? We can’t maintain that illusion.
Juan Gris, (Spanish, 1887 – 1927) Breakfast, 1914, collage, crayon and oil on canvas, 80 x 59cm.

9. Picasso, Still life with chair caning, 1912.
Items used in collage (e.g. newspaper) and collages of photographic items (called photomontage) were themselves copies of things. Collage raised questions about reality; illusions; originality. Collages also questioned the traditional skills involved with artmaking, as there was no technical skill involved with cutting and glueing things down. Also, things that were collaged (and similarly, Cubist works) didn’t necessarily ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE the subject. They represented the object in a more abstract sense ( just as text represents a word.) This was happening for the first time and was shocking and confusing to many.
If we remember Warhol’s 1969 screen print of the Campbell’s Soup can last session, the technique of collage pre-figured Pop Art’s ideas about commercialism; human mark-making, etc.

10. Examples of figuration influenced by Primitivism and Cubism.
Amedeo Modigliani (Italian, 1884–1920) Woman’s Head, 1912, limestone, 69 x 24 x 25 cm)
Constantin Brancusi (Romania 1876 – 1957)
The Kiss, 1916, limestone, 58 x 34 x 25 cm)