Raymond Mathewson Hood was an American architect who worked in the Neo-Gothic and Art Deco styles. He is best known for his designs of the Tribune Tower, American Radiator Building, and Rockefeller Center. Through a short yet highly successful career, Hood exerted an outsized influence on twentieth century architecture.
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her meticulous paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.
Precisionism was a modernist art movement that emerged in the United States after World War I. Influenced by Cubism, Purism, and Futurism, Precisionist artists reduced subjects to their essential geometric shapes, eliminated detail, and often used planes of light to create a sense of crisp focus and suggest the sleekness and sheen of machine forms. At the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, Precisionism celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called "Cubist-Realism." The term "Precisionism" was first coined in the mid-1920s, possibly by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr although according to Amy Dempsey the term "Precisionism" was coined by Charles Sheeler. Painters working in this style were also known as the "Immaculates", which was the more commonly used term at the time. The stiffness of both art-historical labels suggests the difficulties contemporary critics had in attempting to characterize these artists.
In the visual arts, a cityscape is an artistic representation, such as a painting, drawing, print or photograph, of the physical aspects of a city or urban area. It is the urban equivalent of a landscape. Townscape is roughly synonymous with cityscape, though it implies the same difference in urban size and density implicit in the difference between the words city and town. In urban design the terms refer to the configuration of built forms and interstitial space.
The architecture of Atlanta is marked by a confluence of classical, modernist, post-modernist, and contemporary architectural styles. Due to the Battle of Atlanta and the subsequent fire in 1864, the city's architecture retains almost no traces of its Antebellum past. Instead, Atlanta's status as a largely post-modern American city is reflected in its architecture, as the city has often been the earliest, if not the first, to showcase new architectural concepts. However, Atlanta's embrace of modernism has translated into an ambivalence toward architectural preservation, resulting in the destruction of architectural masterpieces, including the Commercial-style Equitable Building, the Beaux-Arts style Terminal Station, and the Classical Carnegie Library. The city's cultural icon, the Neo-Moorish Fox Theatre, would have met the same fate had it not been for a grassroots effort to save it in the mid-1970s.
The American Radiator Building is an early skyscraper at 40 West 40th Street, just south of Bryant Park, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It was designed by Raymond Hood and André Fouilhoux in the Gothic and Art Deco styles for the American Radiator Company. The original section of the American Radiator Building, a 338 ft-tall (103 m), 23-story tower, was completed in 1924. A five-story annex, to the west of the original tower, was built from 1936 to 1937.
Arnold Rönnebeck was a German-born American modernist artist and museum administrator. He was a vital member of both the European and American avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century before settling in Denver, Colorado. Rönnebeck was a sculptor and painter, but is best known for his lithographs that featured a range of subjects including New York cityscapes, New Mexico and Colorado landscapes and Native American dances.
The Master Apartments, officially known as the Master Building, is a 27-story Art Deco skyscraper at 310 Riverside Drive, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. It sits on the northeast corner of Riverside Drive and West 103rd Street. Designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett of the firm Helmle, Corbett & Harrison, in conjunction with Sugarman & Berger, the Master Apartments was completed in 1929 as the tallest building on Riverside Drive. It was the first skyscraper in New York City to feature corner windows and the first to employ brick in varying colors for its entire exterior.
Todd Webb was an American photographer notable for documenting everyday life and architecture in cities such as New York City, Paris as well as from the American west. He traveled extensively during his long life and had important friendships with artists such as Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Harry Callahan.
Agnes Lawrence Pelton (1881–1961) was a modernist painter who was born in Germany and moved to the United States as a child. She studied art in the United States and Europe. She made portraits of Pueblo Native Americans, desert landscapes and still lifes. Pelton's work evolved through at least three distinct themes: her early "Imaginative Paintings," art of the American Southwest people and landscape, and abstract art that reflected her spiritual beliefs. She was a first cousin of American sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser.
Jimson Weed is an oil on linen painting by American artist Georgia O'Keeffe from 1936, located in the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana. It depicts four large blossoms of jimson weed. A similar work by O'Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, was sold by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum at auction to Walmart heiress Alice Walton in 2014 for $44,405,000, more than tripling the previous world auction record for a piece by a female artist.
The Art Deco style, which originated in France just before World War I, had an important impact on architecture and design in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The most famous examples are the skyscrapers of New York City including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center. It combined modern aesthetics, fine craftsmanship and expensive materials, and became the symbol of luxury and modernity. While rarely used in residences, it was frequently used for office buildings, government buildings, train stations, movie theaters, diners and department stores. It also was frequently used in furniture, and in the design of automobiles, ocean liners, and everyday objects such as toasters and radio sets. In the late 1930s, during the Great Depression, it featured prominently in the architecture of the immense public works projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. The style competed throughout the period with the modernist architecture, and came to an abrupt end in 1939 with the beginning of World War II. The style was rediscovered in the 1960s, and many of the original buildings have been restored and are now historical landmarks.
Georgia O'Keeffe made a number of Red Canna paintings of the canna lily plant, first in watercolor, such as a red canna flower bouquet painted in 1915, but primarily abstract paintings of close-up images in oil. O'Keeffe said that she made the paintings to reflect the way she herself saw flowers, although others have called her depictions erotic, and compared them to female genitalia. O'Keeffe said they had misconstrued her intentions for doing her flower paintings: "Well – I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don't."
The early works of American artist Georgia O'Keeffe are those made before she was introduced to the principles of Arthur Wesley Dow in 1912.
Black Iris, sometimes called Black Iris III, is a 1926 oil painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. Art historian Linda Nochlin interpreted Black Iris as a morphological metaphor for female genitalia. O'Keeffe rejected such interpretations in a 1939 text accompanying an exhibition of her work by writing: "Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't." She attempted to do away with sexualized readings of her work by adding a lot of detail.
The American artist Georgia O'Keeffe is best known for her close-up, or large-scale flower paintings, which she painted from the mid-1920s through the 1950s. She made about 200 paintings of flowers of the more than 2,000 paintings that she made over her career. One of her paintings, Jimson Weed, sold for $44.4 million, making it the most expensive painting sold of a female artist's work as of 2014.
The Lawrence Tree is a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1929 of a large ponderosa pine tree on the D. H. Lawrence Ranch in Taos County, New Mexico. The tree still survives and may be visited at the Lawrence Ranch.
The New York Marriott East Side is a former hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The 34-story, 387 ft (118 m) building was designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon in a classical style and was developed by James T. Lee, grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It was constructed between 1922 and 1923 as the Shelton Hotel, an apartment hotel. The Marriott East Side, one of several large hotels developed around Grand Central Terminal as part of Terminal City, is a New York City designated landmark.
Pearl C. Hsiung is a Taiwan-born American multi-media artist based in Los Angeles.
Sky Above Clouds (1960–1977) is a series of cloudscape paintings by American artist Georgia O'Keeffe made during her late period. The works were completed at her home and studio in Abiquiú and at her Ghost Ranch studio in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Only four paintings in the series share the same motif–a pink sky above the horizon with patches of cloudlets, or cloud streets below it, progressing from smaller to larger canvases. The motif was inspired by views from her airplane window during her frequent air travel in the 1950s and early 1960s when she flew around the world. Sky above Clouds IV, the fourth version in the shared motif of the series, is two meters high and seven meters wide. It is the largest painting ever created by the artist, accomplished at the age of 77 in the summer of 1965. Two of the paintings in the series are held by private collectors, while the rest are found in the National Gallery of Art, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
