The Art Bulletin
December 2008, Volume XC Number 4
Traceable to the tenth or eleventh century, the standard iconography of Eve created from Adam’s side was not designed for naturalistically rendered figures. In the Creation of Eve (1334–37) from the campanile of Florence Cathedral, however, Andrea Pisano rendered the half-formed Eve in accordance with Aristotelian theories about the natural relation of body and soul then current among theologians and later assumed by art theorists. The naturalistic treatment of Eve’s body necessitated subtle revisions to the traditional iconography, raised a key issue for Renaissance art, was significant for the civic program of the campanile, and embodied a common misogynist notion.
The Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art show (1934) displayed ordinary things as works of art. It thus provides a useful case study for investigating interwar American modernism as a negotiation between meaning and materiality: terms up for renewed debate in the midst of the Great Depression. Through Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s catalog essay and Philip Johnson’s installation, Machine Art advanced a Neoplatonic model of materiality-one consistent with Johnson’s undergraduate training at Harvard, modernism’s pursuit of purity, and the rash of gold hoarding that spread in the United States after the American gold standard was abandoned in 1933.
The Subversion of Gravity in Jackson Pollock’s Abstractions
It is generally acknowledged that Pollock’s mode of painting was contingent on an idiosyncratic employment of gravity: pouring paint, after all, is a gravitational phenomenon par excellence. This defining aspect of Pollock’s technique--his enlisting of fluid dynamics in the artistic process-invites scrutiny from the perspective of both art and science. In close collaboration, an art historian and a physicist investigate, for the first time, the mechanics of Pollock’s handling of liquid paint under gravity, permitting an exploration of the formal advances thereby enabled and their broader implications for the meaning and ethos of his work.
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