Washington, D.C.
Washington, D. C. formally the District of Columbia and referred to as Washington or D. C. is the capital of the United States. Founded after the American Revolution as the seat of government of the newly independent country, Washington was named after George Washington, first President of the United States and Founding Father; as the seat of the United States federal government and several international organizations, Washington is an important world political capital. The city is one of the most visited cities in the world, with more than 20 million tourists annually; the signing of the Residence Act on July 16, 1790, approved the creation of a capital district located along the Potomac River on the country's East Coast. The U. S. Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the U. S. Congress, the District is therefore not a part of any state; the states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, which included the pre-existing settlements of Georgetown and Alexandria.
The City of Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land ceded by Virginia. Washington had an estimated population of 702,455 as of July 2018, making it the 20th most populous city in the United States. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the city's daytime population to more than one million during the workweek. Washington's metropolitan area, the country's sixth largest, had a 2017 estimated population of 6.2 million residents. All three branches of the U. S. federal government are centered in the District: Congress and the U. S. Supreme Court. Washington is home to many national monuments, museums situated on or around the National Mall; the city hosts 177 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of many international organizations, trade unions, non-profit, lobbying groups, professional associations, including the World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization of American States, AARP, the National Geographic Society, the Human Rights Campaign, the International Finance Corporation, the American Red Cross.
A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973. However, Congress may overturn local laws. D. C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, but the District has no representation in the Senate. The District receives three electoral votes in presidential elections as permitted by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1961. Various tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Piscataway people inhabited the lands around the Potomac River when Europeans first visited the area in the early 17th century. One group known as the Nacotchtank maintained settlements around the Anacostia River within the present-day District of Columbia. Conflicts with European colonists and neighboring tribes forced the relocation of the Piscataway people, some of whom established a new settlement in 1699 near Point of Rocks, Maryland. In his Federalist No. 43, published January 23, 1788, James Madison argued that the new federal government would need authority over a national capital to provide for its own maintenance and safety.
Five years earlier, a band of unpaid soldiers besieged Congress while its members were meeting in Philadelphia. Known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the event emphasized the need for the national government not to rely on any state for its own security. Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution permits the establishment of a "District as may, by cession of particular states, the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States". However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital. In what is now known as the Compromise of 1790, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson came to an agreement that the federal government would pay each state's remaining Revolutionary War debts in exchange for establishing the new national capital in the southern United States. On July 9, 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River; the exact location was to be selected by President George Washington, who signed the bill into law on July 16.
Formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, the initial shape of the federal district was a square measuring 10 miles on each side, totaling 100 square miles. Two pre-existing settlements were included in the territory: the port of Georgetown, founded in 1751, the city of Alexandria, founded in 1749. During 1791–92, Andrew Ellicott and several assistants, including a free African American astronomer named Benjamin Banneker, surveyed the borders of the federal district and placed boundary stones at every mile point. Many of the stones are still standing. A new federal city was constructed on the north bank of the Potomac, to the east of Georgetown. On September 9, 1791, the three commissioners overseeing the capital's construction named the city in honor of President Washington; the federal district was named Columbia, a poetic name for the United States in use at that time. Congress held its first session in Washington on November 17, 1800. Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 that organized the District and placed the entire territory under the exclusive control of the federal
Ryōan-ji
Ryōan-ji is a Zen temple located in northwest Kyoto, Japan. It belongs to the Myōshin-ji school of the Rinzai branch of Zen Buddhism; the Ryōan-ji garden is considered one of the finest surviving examples of kare-sansui, a refined type of Japanese Zen temple garden design featuring distinctive larger rock formations arranged amidst a sweep of smooth pebbles raked into linear patterns that facilitate meditation. The temple and its gardens are listed as one of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the site of the temple was an estate of the Fujiwara clan in the 11th century. The first temple, the Daiju-in, the still existing large pond were built in that century by Fujiwara Saneyoshi. In 1450, Hosokawa Katsumoto, another powerful warlord, acquired the land, he built his residence there, founded a Zen temple, Ryōan-ji. During the Ōnin War between the clans, the temple was destroyed. Hosokawa Katsumoto died in 1473. In 1488, his son, Hosokawa Matsumoto, rebuilt the temple.
The temple served as a mausoleum for several emperors. Their tombs are grouped together in; the burial places of these emperors—Uda, Ichijō, Go-Suzaku, Go-Reizei, Go-Sanjō, Horikawa—would have been comparatively humble in the period after their deaths. These tombs reached their present state as a result of the 19th century restoration of imperial sepulchers which were ordered by Emperor Meiji. There is controversy over when. Most sources date the garden to the second half of the 15th century. According to some sources, the garden was built by Hosokawa Katsumoto, the creator of the first temple of Ryōan-ji, between 1450 and 1473. Other sources say it was built by his son, Hosokawa Masamoto, in or around 1488; some say that the garden was built by the famous landscape painter and monk, Sōami, but this is disputed by other authors. Some sources say. Other authors say the garden was built much during the Edo period, between 1618 and 1680. There is controversy over whether the garden was built by monks, or by professional gardeners, called kawaramono, or a combination of the two.
One stone in the garden has the name of two kawaramono carved into it, Hirokojirō and Kotarō. The conclusive history, based on documentary sources, is as follows: Hosokawa Katsumoto, deputy to the shōgun, founded in 1450 the Ryōan-ji temple, but the complex was burnt down during the Ōnin War, his son Masamoto rebuilt the temple at the end of the same century. It is not clear. First descriptions of a garden describing one in front of the main hall, date from 1680–1682, it is described as a composition of nine big stones laid out to represent Tiger Cubs Crossing the Water. As the garden has fifteen stones at present, it was different from the garden that we see today. A great fire destroyed the buildings in 1779, rubble of the burnt buildings was dumped in the garden. Garden writer and specialist Akisato Rito redid the garden on top of the rubble at the end of the eighteenth century and published a picture of his garden in his Celebrated Gardens and Sights of Kyoto of 1799, showing the garden as it looks today.
One big stone at the back was buried partly. There is no evidence of Zen monks having worked on the garden, apart from the raking of the sand; the temple's name is synonymous with the temple's famous Zen garden, the karesansui rock garden, thought to have been built in the late 15th century. The garden is a rectangle of 248 square meters. Young and Young put the size at twenty-five meters by ten meters. Placed within it are fifteen stones of different sizes composed in five groups; the stones are surrounded by white gravel, raked each day by the monks. The only vegetation in the garden is some moss around the stones; the garden is meant to be viewed from a seated position on the veranda of the hōjō, the residence of the abbot of the monastery. The stones are placed, they are arranged so that when looking at the garden from any angle only fourteen of the boulders are visible at one time. It is traditionally said that only through attaining enlightenment would one be able to view the fifteenth boulder.
The wall behind the garden is an important element of the garden. It is made of clay, stained by age with subtle brown and orange tones. In 1977, the tile roof of the wall was restored with tree bark to its original appearance; when the garden was rebuilt in 1799, it came up higher than before and a view over the wall to the mountain scenery behind came about. At present this view is blocked by trees; the garden had particular significance for the composer John Cage, who composed a series of works and made visual art works based on it. Like any work of art, the artistic garden of Ryōan-ji is open to interpretation, or scientific research into possible meanings. Many different theories have been put forward inside and outside Japan about what the garden is supposed to represent, from islands in a stream, to swimming baby tigers to the peaks of mountains rising above to theories about secrets of geometry or of the rules
Charles Ray (artist)
Charles Ray is a Los Angeles-based American sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer's perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways. Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray's "career as an artist…is among the most important of the last twenty years." Charles Ray was born in Chicago as the son of Wade Ray. He has a sister, he earned his BFA at the University of Iowa and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He studied sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History with Roland Brener, who exposed Ray to many of developments of Modernist sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of artists like Anthony Caro and David Smith. In an interview, Ray spoke of early influences, he studied with Stephen Zaima, where Ray executed many of his performance piece in the undergraduate studio like the Plank Piece."Caro's work was like a template. The formal rules as taught by Brener were a kind of nourishment for me.
The actual working in the studio was, in a sense, the expression. I was taught. Once a sculpture was completed it was put back on to the scrap pile; this way of working taught me to think sculpturally rather than to think about sculpture. At this time in my life the historical context of high Modernism was beyond my grasp. I saw Caro as super-contemporary, his work was, is, so alive. It bridges the gap between the inside and outside of my mind."Ray has headed the sculpture department at UCLA since 1981. Ray's work is difficult to classify. Style, subject and scale are all variable. Critic Anne Wagner finds the consistent quality to be this: "In all his seamlessly executed objects, Ray fixates on how and why things happen, to say nothing of wondering what does happen in the field of vision, how such events might be remade as art." This and the level of art historical awareness behind his works has led many critics to call Ray a sculptor's sculptor. His art has managed to find a large audience, thanks in part to its striking or beguiling nature.
Ray recapitulated many of the developments in twentieth-century sculpture in his first show in 1971 with an installation entitled One-Stop Gallery. The show consisted of a collection of small sculptures; some of the works, in their attention to materials, were inspired by Minimalist artists like Robert Morris, while two small constructed steel sculptures invoke the traditions taught by his teacher, Brener. One-Stop Gallery would anticipate the tone for much of Ray's work to come in its plumbing and reinterpreting of the canon of twentieth-century sculpture without having his own work appeal to any particular period or style. Influenced by Caro, by including his own body in his works he made them more like documented performances. In the two-part photographic work Plank Piece I–II, for example, he pinned his body to the wall with a large piece of wood. In the late 1980s, Ray conceived Minimalist works using wire. In Ink Box, a large cube is filled to the brim with ink. Ink Line is a continuous stream of black ink traveling from a dime-size opening in the ceiling into a similar hole in the floor.
In Spinning Spot, a section of the floor measuring 24 inches in diameter is set spinning at 33 RPM. Consisting of a single 8.5 foot length of wire, both ends of Moving Wire protrude from the wall and are set 14 inches apart. For Unpainted Sculpture, over the course of two years, Ray has reconstructed a life-sized crashed Pontiac Grand Am out of fiberglass and assembling each piece to match the bent and twisted forms of the original Despite the work's misleading title, it is painted a soft dove grey, reminiscent of the plastic parts of model car kits, his most labor-intensive work to date is the ten-year re-creation in Japanese cypress of a fallen and rotting tree he had found in a meadow. With Hinoki, Ray had a mold made of a large rotting tree, he hired a team of Japanese woodcarvers in Osaka to re-carve the tree in Hinoki, a different wood than that of the original tree. In an interview with Michael Fried, Ray made it clear that the purpose of the piece was not to photorealistically carve an exact replica of the tree.
"The tree had that beautiful interior that fallen logs have," he says. "It happens when bugs eat out the hard wood, so you have this hollow thing. All I knew was that I wanted to carve that, I wanted them to have a sense of that interior because it's in there if it couldn't be seen. So, important, and I became involved with the outside as well…It mattered to me that somebody had looked at it, I wanted to make it matter to you."Ray's critically acclaimed Firetruck, a full-size aluminum and Plexiglas installation, has been exhibited on Madison Avenue in New York, in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The giant replica of a red toy firetruck was exhibited outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. In 2009, Ray installed Boy with Frog, his first outdoor commissioned work, at the Punta della Dogana, Venice. Grand in size and realized with a smooth white finish that references the important tradition of marble sculpture in Italy, it depicted a boy holding a goliath
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder was an American sculptor, best known for his innovative mobiles that embrace chance in their aesthetic and his monumental public sculptures. Born into a family of artists, Calder's work first gained attention in Paris in the 1920s and was soon championed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resulting in a retrospective exhibition in 1943. Major retrospectives were held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Calder's work is in many permanent collections, most notably in the Whitney Museum of American Art, but the Guggenheim Museum. C.. He produced many large public works, including.125, Pittsburgh Spirale and Universe, Mountains and Clouds. Although known for his sculpture, Calder created paintings and prints, theater set design, jewelry design and rugs, political posters. Calder was honored by the US Postal Service with a set of five 32-cent stamps in 1998, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously in 1977, after refusing to receive it from Gerald Ford one year earlier in protest of the Vietnam War.
Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in 1898 in Pennsylvania. His actual birthday, remains a source of confusion. According to Calder's mother, Calder was born on August 22, yet his birth certificate at Philadelphia City Hall, based on a hand-written ledger, stated July 22; when Calder's family learned about the birth certificate, they reasserted with certainty that city officials had made a mistake. Calder's grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland, had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868, is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall's tower, his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in nearby Philadelphia. Calder's mother was a professional portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893, she moved to Philadelphia, where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Calder's parents married on February 22, 1895. Alexandrr Calder's sister, Mrs. Margaret Calder Hayes, was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum. In 1902, Calder posed nude for his father's sculpture The Man Cub, a cast of, now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; that same year he completed his earliest sculpture, a clay elephant. Three years Alexander's father contracted tuberculosis, Calder's parents moved to a ranch in Oracle, leaving the children in the care of family friends for a year; the children were reunited with their parents in late March 1906 and stayed at the ranch in Arizona until autumn of the same year. After Arizona, the Calder family moved to California; the windowed cellar of the family home became Calder's first studio and he received his first set of tools. He used scraps of copper wire. On January 1, 1907, Nanette Calder took her son to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, where he observed a four-horse-chariot race; this style of event became the finale of Calder's miniature circus performances.
In the fall of 1909, the Calder family moved back to Philadelphia, where Calder attended Germantown Academy moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. That Christmas, he sculpted a duck out of sheet brass as gifts for his parents; the sculptures are three-dimensional and the duck is kinetic because it rocks when tapped. In Croton, during his early high school years, Calder was befriended by his father's painter friend Everett Shinn with whom he built a gravity powered system of mechanical trains. Calder described it, "We ran the train on wooden rails held by spikes. We lit up some cars with candle lights". After Croton, the Calders moved to Spuyten Duyvil to be closer to New York City, where Stirling Calder rented a studio. While living in Spuyten Duyvil, Calder attended high school in nearby Yonkers. In 1912, Stirling Calder was appointed acting chief of the Department of Sculpture of the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco and began work on sculptures for the exposition, held in 1915.
During Calder's high school years, the family moved forth between New York and California. In each new location, Calder's parents reserved cellar space as a studio for their son. Toward the end of this period, Calder stayed with friends in California while his parents moved back to New York, so that he could graduate from Lowell High School in San Francisco. Calder graduated with the class of 1915. Alexander Calder's parents did not want him to be an artist, so he decided to study mechanical engineering. An intuitive engineer since childhood, Calder did not know what mechanical engineering was. "I was not sure what this term meant, but I thought I'd better adopt it", he wrote in his autobiography. He enrolled at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1915; when asked why he decided to study mechanical engineering instead of art Calder said, "I wanted to be an engineer because some guy I rather lik
Limestone
Limestone is a carbonate sedimentary rock, composed of the skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral and molluscs. Its major materials are the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate. A related rock is dolostone, which contains a high percentage of the mineral dolomite, CaMg2. In fact, in old USGS publications, dolostone was referred to as magnesian limestone, a term now reserved for magnesium-deficient dolostones or magnesium-rich limestones. About 10% of sedimentary rocks are limestones; the solubility of limestone in water and weak acid solutions leads to karst landscapes, in which water erodes the limestone over thousands to millions of years. Most cave systems are through limestone bedrock. Limestone has numerous uses: as a building material, an essential component of concrete, as aggregate for the base of roads, as white pigment or filler in products such as toothpaste or paints, as a chemical feedstock for the production of lime, as a soil conditioner, or as a popular decorative addition to rock gardens.
Like most other sedimentary rocks, most limestone is composed of grains. Most grains in limestone are skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as foraminifera; these organisms secrete shells made of aragonite or calcite, leave these shells behind when they die. Other carbonate grains composing limestones are ooids, peloids and extraclasts. Limestone contains variable amounts of silica in the form of chert or siliceous skeletal fragment, varying amounts of clay and sand carried in by rivers; some limestones do not consist of grains, are formed by the chemical precipitation of calcite or aragonite, i.e. travertine. Secondary calcite may be deposited by supersaturated meteoric waters; this produces speleothems, such as stalactites. Another form taken by calcite is oolitic limestone, which can be recognized by its granular appearance; the primary source of the calcite in limestone is most marine organisms. Some of these organisms can construct mounds of rock building upon past generations. Below about 3,000 meters, water pressure and temperature conditions cause the dissolution of calcite to increase nonlinearly, so limestone does not form in deeper waters.
Limestones may form in lacustrine and evaporite depositional environments. Calcite can be dissolved or precipitated by groundwater, depending on several factors, including the water temperature, pH, dissolved ion concentrations. Calcite exhibits an unusual characteristic called retrograde solubility, in which it becomes less soluble in water as the temperature increases. Impurities will cause limestones to exhibit different colors with weathered surfaces. Limestone may be crystalline, granular, or massive, depending on the method of formation. Crystals of calcite, dolomite or barite may line small cavities in the rock; when conditions are right for precipitation, calcite forms mineral coatings that cement the existing rock grains together, or it can fill fractures. Travertine is a banded, compact variety of limestone formed along streams where there are waterfalls and around hot or cold springs. Calcium carbonate is deposited where evaporation of the water leaves a solution supersaturated with the chemical constituents of calcite.
Tufa, a porous or cellular variety of travertine, is found near waterfalls. Coquina is a poorly consolidated limestone composed of pieces of coral or shells. During regional metamorphism that occurs during the mountain building process, limestone recrystallizes into marble. Limestone is a parent material of Mollisol soil group. Two major classification schemes, the Folk and the Dunham, are used for identifying the types of carbonate rocks collectively known as limestone. Robert L. Folk developed a classification system that places primary emphasis on the detailed composition of grains and interstitial material in carbonate rocks. Based on composition, there are three main components: allochems and cement; the Folk system uses two-part names. It is helpful to have a petrographic microscope when using the Folk scheme, because it is easier to determine the components present in each sample; the Dunham scheme focuses on depositional textures. Each name is based upon the texture of the grains. Robert J. Dunham published his system for limestone in 1962.
Dunham divides the rocks into four main groups based on relative proportions of coarser clastic particles. Dunham names are for rock families, his efforts deal with the question of whether or not the grains were in mutual contact, therefore self-supporting, or whether the rock is characterized by the presence of frame builders and algal mats. Unlike the Folk scheme, Dunham deals with the original porosity of the rock; the Dunham scheme is more useful for hand samples because it is based on texture, not the grains in the sample. A revised classification was proposed by Wright, it adds some diagenetic patterns and can be summarized as follows: See: Carbonate platform About 10% of all sedimentary rocks are limestones. Limestone is soluble in acid, therefore forms many erosional landforms; these include limestone pavements, pot holes, cenotes and gorges. Such erosion landscapes are known
Tony Smith (sculptor)
Anthony Peter Smith was an American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer, a noted theorist on art. He is cited as a pioneering figure in American Minimalist sculpture. Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey to a waterworks manufacturing family started by his grandfather and namesake, A. P. Smith. Tony contracted tuberculosis around 1916. In an effort to speed his recovery, protect his immune system, protect his siblings, his family constructed a one-room prefabricated house in the backyard, he had tutors to keep up with his school work. His medicine came in little boxes. Sometimes he visited the waterworks factory, marveling at the industrial production and fabrication processes. Smith commuted to a Jesuit high school in New York City. In the spring and summer of 1931 he attended Fordham University, in the fall enrolled at Georgetown University. Smith was disillusioned with formal education, returned to New Jersey in January 1932, during the Great Depression, he opened a second-hand bookstore in Newark on Broad Street.
From 1934 to 1936, he worked days at the family factory and attended evening courses at the Art Students League of New York where he studied anatomy with George Bridgman and watercolor with George Grosz, painting with Vaclav Vytlacil. In 1937, he moved to Chicago intending to study architecture at the New Bauhaus, where he absorbed the interdisciplinary curriculum but was disillusioned; the following year, Smith began working for Frank Lloyd Wright's Ardmore Project near Philadelphia, where he began as a carpenter helper and bricklayer, was named Clerk-of-the-Works. After a brief period with Wright in Taliesin, Smith worked building the Armstrong house in Ogden Dunes, Indiana; this period ended when his mother fell ill in 1940 and Smith returned to New Jersey. His father died on December 1 of that year. In 1940, Smith began his career as an independent architectural designer, which lasted until the early 1960s, he built twenty private homes and envisioned many unrealized projects, such as the 1950 Model Roman Catholic Church, with paintings on glass by Jackson Pollock.
His work included homes for many in the art community, including Fritz Bultman, Theodoros Stamos Fred Olsen, Betty Parsons. Despite these successes, the architect-client relationship frustrated Smith enough that he gravitated toward his artwork. Smith returned to the East Coast after two years in Hollywood and began teaching, while developing architectural projects, at the same time as developing various theoretical ideas and painting abstractly, he became a central member of the New York School community, with ties ranging from Gerald Kamrowski to Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. He lived in Germany and traveled extensively in Europe from 1953–55, accompanying his wife Jane, there as an opera singer. There he developed a new group of architectural projects and painted extensively, including the landmark group of Louisenberg paintings. Chiara Smith was born in 1954. Twins Beatrice and Seton were born after the family returned to South Orange, in 1955. Smith taught architecture and design-related classes at the Delahanty Institute and Pratt Institute, where he developed Throne.
This critical early work developed from a class assignment for students at Pratt to determine the simplest possible three-dimensional joint that could be stacked for more than two levels. Smith enhanced the geometrical solution of four triangular prisms by adding another joint, resulting in a new form with seven triangular prisms enclosing two tetrahedra. After some time passed, he decided that the resulting form was something other than a design exercise, so titled it Throne because the symmetrical abstraction reminded him of the dense volume of an African beaded throne. Smith joined the faculty at Vermont. In 1960 a class project investigating close-packed cells based on D'Arcy Thompson's book Growth & Form sparked Smith's search for artistic inspiration in the natural world; the resulting agglomeration of 14-sided tetrakaidecahedrons, the ideally efficient soap-bubble cell, is known as the Bennington Structure. This was the first time Smith saw the impact that enlarged geometric shapes could have as independent but architecturally scaled forms - as sculpture.
While recovering from an automobile accident at home in 1961, Smith started to create small sculptural maquettes using agglomerations of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. By 1962 he was teaching at Hunter College. In this year he created Black Box; the dense rectangular prism, less than two feet high, developed from a mundane object, a 3 x 5" file card box that Smith saw on the desk of his Eugene Goossen, his colleague and friend. Smith enlarged the proportions of the box five times, like a recent class assignment, he phoned a local fabricator, Industrial Welding, whose billboard he had seen while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and asked them to deliver it to his suburban home. Although the welders assumed he was crazed, they treated the project with the utmost workmanship and the result was a stunning form to Smith. With this piece, entitled Black Box, Smith had discovered a sculpting process that he continued to hone. Where others saw a pure geometric shape, Smith saw it as a mysterious form.
The title alluded to the corrupt administration
Lee Krasner
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American abstract expressionist painter, with a strong speciality in collage, married to Jackson Pollock. This somewhat overshadowed her contribution at the time, though there was much cross-pollination between their two styles. Krasner’s training, influenced by George Bridgman and Hans Hofmann, was the more formalized in the depiction of human anatomy, this enriched Pollock’s more intuitive and unstructured output. Krasner is now seen as a key transitional figure within abstraction, who connected early-20th-century art with the new ideas of postwar America, her work fetches high prices at auction, she is one of the few female artists to have had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art. Krasner was born as Lena Krassner on October 27, 1908 in New York. Krasner was the daughter of Joseph Krasner, her parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, from a Jewish community in what is now Ukraine. Her parents fled to the United States to escape the Russo-Japanese War, her mother Chane changed her name to Anna.
Lee was the fourth of five children, including her sister and the first, born in America. She was the only one of her siblings to be born in the United States. From an early age, Krasner knew. Krasner's career as an artist began, she sought out enrollment at Washington Irving High School for Girls since they offered an art major. After graduating from high school, she attended the Women's Art School of Cooper Union on a scholarship. Here, she completed the course work required for a teaching certificate in art. Krasner pursued yet more art education at the illustrious National Academy of Design, completing her course load there in 1932. By 1928, she enrolled in the National Academy of Design. By attending a technical art school, Krasner was able to gain an extensive and thorough artistic education as illustrated through her knowledge of the techniques of the Old Masters, she became skilled in portraying anatomically correct figures. There are few works that survive from this time period apart from a few self-portraits and still lifes since most of the works were burned in a fire.
One of the images that still exists from this time period is her "Self Portrait" painted in 1930. She submitted it to the National Academy in order to enroll in a certain class, but the judges could not believe that the young artist produced a self-portrait en plein air. In it, she depicts herself with a defiant expression surrounded by nature, she briefly enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1928. Here, she took a class led by George Bridgman. Krasner was influenced by the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929, she was affected by post-impressionism and grew critical of the academic notions of style she had learned at the National Academy. In the 1930s, she began studying modern art through learning the components of composition and theory; this initial investigation into modern art formed her work throughout the rest of her career. She began taking classes from Hans Hofmann in 1937, which modernized her approach to the nude and still life, he emphasized the two-dimensional nature of the picture plane and usage of color to create spatial illusion, not representative of reality through his lessons.
Throughout her classes with Hofmann, Krasner worked in an advanced style of cubism known as neo-cubism. During the class, a human nude or a still life setting would be the model from which Krasner and other students would have to work, she created charcoal drawings of the human models and oil on paper color studies of the still life settings. She illustrated female nudes in a cubist manner with tension achieved through the fragmentation of forms and the opposition of light and dark colors; the still lifes illustrated her interest in fauvism since she suspended brightly colored pigment on white backgrounds. Hans Hofmann "was negative" she said "but one day he stood before my easel and he gave me the first praise I had received as an artist from him, he said,'This is so good, you would never know it was done by a woman". She received praise from Piet Mondrian who once told her "You have a strong inner rhythm, it became too difficult for Krasner to support herself as a waitress due to the Great Depression.
In order to provide for herself, she joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in 1935. She worked on the mural division as an assistant to Max Spivak, her job was to enlarge other artists' designs for large-scaled public murals. Since murals were created to be understood and appreciated by the general public, the abstract art Krasner produced was undesirable for murals. While Krasner was happy to have a job, she was dissatisfied since she did not like working with figurative images created by other artists. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, she created gouache sketches in the hopes of one day creating an abstract mural; as soon as one of her proposals for a mural was approved for the WYNC radio station, the Works Progress Administration turned into War Services and all art had to be created for war propaganda. She continued working for War Services by creating collages for the war effort which were displayed in the windows of nineteen department stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
She was involved with the Artists Union during her employment with the WPA but was one of the first to quit the organization when she realized the communists were taking it over. By being part
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