Title: Franz Kline – Black and white series with car tail fin. In researching one of the founding members of the Abstract Expressionists I discovered towards the end of one of Franz Kline’s monographs that he was over the moon in love with automobiles. It gave me the idea to insert into his compositions the latest developments for cars – tailfins. I had been looking at Kline’s enormous abstract compositions for decades but had never thought about tailfins before. But in thinking about technology it turned on the potential new connection. Given the constant advertising and presence of cars in NY the concept of auto advancements seeping into Kline’s subconscious is no longer a farfetched concept.

Title: Kandinsky’s canons. The Expressionists would paint during the exceedingly mechanized period of WW1. WW1 for the first time used mass produced armaments as never before. The technology used in WW1delivered slaughter of an unimaginable scale. During just four short days in September 1914 at the battle of the Marne there were over 500,000 casualties! That is roughly equivalent to the population of Baltimore. All that carnage in just four days.

Title: Metropolis worker. Films, such as Metropolis focused on new technology as well. Metropolis was focused like a laser beam on the changes technology was bringing to the world. In Metropolis there is even a robot android named Maria. Mass production, electricity and automation were core themes of the nascent movie industry.

Title: Rauschenberg’s 1963 City Street Signs. In 1963 Robert Rauschenberg made a montage of city street signs which then went on to become a staple in his works through the years. The street signs say: Fine ST, One Way (repeated), Public Shelter (a nuclear fallout shelter) and STOP. The de-industrialization of the US was the primary subject he used in all his “found” objects. The cities were beginning to look old and frail.

Title: LICHTENSTEIN’s WHAM. Nothing says technology like an image of a jet fighter plane shooting down another plane using a missile.

Title: Motherwell’s Elegy to Spanish Republic. As I experimented with Motherwell’s compositions it dawned on me that if I flipped his Elegies on their side they even looked like the fallout of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb’s detonation. This idea did not immediately come to me. It only came to me as I painted more studies on Motherwell. This is the value of thinking through logic problems visually. An answer can present itself through exercises in visual thinking. Mushroom clouds are unique in that they feature multiple plumes as they radiate upward after their initial explosion. A conventional bomb only features a single plume following its explosion. This is significant because when viewing Motherwell’s Elegy series on their side they always featured multiple plumes. This distinctive attribute is clearly shown in the study number three by having superimposed the nuclear explosion on the Elegy sideways.

Title: Motherwell’s second explanation for the Elegy series. Motherwell painted hundreds of Elegies to the Spanish Republic. The Spanish Republic was taken down by fascists (Franco & Nazi’s) which is the loss of innocence he was referencing with the title. The ongoing fears of nuclear destruction were very real during Motherwell’s early painting days as a youngster. The signs cropped across the US along with air raid sirens and fallout drills and shelters. The threat for the potential of imminent loss and destruction was in most peoples’ minds. The abundance of the signs represented a tangible change. Elementary children would roll under their desks and cover their heads with their hands in absurd drills. This was shown on the nightly news. The sites of helpless children participating in futile exercises embedded in Motherwell’s mind the need to depict the loss of child like innocence for the rest of his life.

Title: How Motherwell subconsciously came to his elegy series. Upper left: a nuclear explosion. Upper right: two nuclear explosions turned on their side, Lower right: the two nuclear explosions colored black, and Lower left: a photo of a Motherwell exhibition showing multiple paintings in the same Elegy series.

Title: Kandinsky Sixth Sound and Fury. Kandinsky would depict the sound of the new industrialized world from the sounds of gramophones to all the newfangled clanking machines. He described the painting as the spiritual experience in rendering sound. In this study I accentuated the vertical height of his compositions by adding industrial cranes. They are meant to reveal the change in vertical scale introduced into the world by industrialization.

Title: Raushenberg’s City Flight. In collecting trash from around the city, Rauschenberg evokes the image of flight with a car tire, a broken barrier and an electrical insulator.

Title: André Derain’s Port. Derain would depict the new industrialized world from the view of a shipping port. In this study I accentuated the vertical height of his composition by adding an industrial crane. They are meant to reveal the change in automation and vertical scale introduced into the world by industrialization.