Making Objects Speak » The Modern World

“Make-it New”: Modernist Visions

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:24:54 +0000

This audio tour introduces undergraduate students to representative artistic achievements from some of the most inventive decades of Modern art in the 20th century. On this tour, students will encounter visual evidence of the Modernist project to “Make it New”— Ezra Pound’s plea to a generation of artists and writers to reject “realistic” and academic representation, as practiced in the 19th century, in favor of drastically new forms of expression in the 20th. After passing through a 1900 Paris subway entrance in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden, students consider themes of dislocation, fragmentation, alienation, gender, and the consequences of war as expressed by Modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Max Beckmann, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Marcel Duchamp. Orozco’s “Dive Bomber and Tank” as well as Beckmann’s “Family Portrait” work well with a discussion of World War I poetry, the consequences of war and the challenges of making peace in the 20th century. Two Cubist paintings by Picasso and a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo support discussions of identity, gender, and issues of fragmentation and alienation preoccupying 20th century poets and novelists, such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Duchamp’s sculpture or assembled “readymade,” “Bicycle Wheel” enhance students’ understanding of collage and assemblage in poetry, from Imagist poets, such as H.D. and Amy Lowell, to avant-garde and radical poets, such as Gertrude Stein. The objects on this tour can also serve as points of comparison between literature and art at the turn of the 19th century and the post-Modern experimentation of the latter half of the 20th century. Finally, the tour invites students to consider the relevance of Modernist work to artists and writers of today.

Harlem Crossroads

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:24:26 +0000

This walking tour examines the history of Harlem, a center of African-American life in the 20th-century. Stops in central Harlem include apartment buildings and houses, businesses, schools, churches, and cultural and political institutions associated with this area’s artistically and historically rich African-American past. This tour centers on themes in the cultural and political history of African-Americans, while providing background and context in the history of New York City.

Immigrant New York: A Walking Tour of the Lower East Side

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:24:07 +0000

The audio tour, “Discovering Immigrant New York City,” leads students through one of the nation’s most significant multi-ethnic historic neighborhoods, Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown and Little Italy. Examining the area’s streetscapes, the tour will draw students’ attention to the visible traces of previous immigrant communities while attending to the lives of recent arrivals. Students will learn how the neighborhood encapsulates several broad themes frequently taught in undergraduate American history and immigration courses – neighborhood succession, Progressive Era reform, the changing immigration law, and the consequences of those changes.

Civil War Stories

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:23:34 +0000

This tour of Civil War artworks and artifacts in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture of the New-York Historical Society is designed to enrich the study of American writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott. Intended for students in American literature courses, the tour uses Whitman’ s observations of the Civil War as a springboard for the examination of relevant paintings, sculptures, and swords and other weapons used in the War. The tour illuminates the Civil War stories that artists have told in their works and that we can glimpse by looking at military artifacts—stories of men and women in the North and South, cavalry charges and maritime combat, African-American leaders, popular culture, heroism and devastation.

Note: Because the New-York Historical Society is undergoing renovations, the Luce Center permanent collections are open by appointment only through November, 2011. To make an appointment, please email Joshua Perea at jperea@nyhistory.org.