Art of western world test 3
performance art
JOSEPH BEUYS, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965.
conceptual art
JOSEPH KOSUTH, One and Three Chairs, 1965.
ÉDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863.
- A distressingly unidealized figure who also seems completely unfazed by her nakedness. She gazes directly at the viewer without shame or flirtatiousness. -Seen as scandalous and pornographic -Loosely based on a painting by Titian—Venus of Urbino. Manet's subject was a young white prostitute. Olympia was a common "professional" name for prostitutes in 19th-century France. -The French public perceived Manet's inclusion of both a black maid and a nude prostitute as evoking moral depravity, inferiority, and animalistic sexuality. -Painter's brushstrokes are much rougher and the shifts in tonality are far more abrupt than those found in traditional academic painting. This departure from accepted practice exacerbated the audacity of the subject matter.
THOMAS EAKINS, The Gross Clinic, 1875.
- Eakins aimed to paint things as he saw them rather than as the public might wish them portrayed. This attitude was very much in tune with 19th-century American taste, combining an admiration for accurate depiction with a hunger for truth. -Prompted the art jury to reject it for the Philadelphia exhibition celebrating the American independence centennial in 1876. The painting portrays the renowned surgeon Dr. Samuel Gross in the operating amphitheater of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.
CLAUDE MONET, Saint-Lazare Train Station, 1877.
- In his "impression" of the Saint-Lazare rail-way terminal, Monet captured the energy and vitality of Paris's modern transportation hub. The train, emerging from the steam and smoke it emits, rumbles into the station. In the background haze are the tall buildings that were becoming a major component of the Parisian landscape. Monet's agitated paint application contributes to the sense of energy and conveys the atmosphere of urban life. -Medieval Paris was torn down and modernized.
HENRI ROUSSEAU, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897.
- In the earlier painting, the recumbent figure occupies a desert world, silent and secret, and dreams beneath a pale, perfectly round moon. In the foreground, a lion resembling a stuffed, but somehow menacing, animal doll sniffs at the gypsy. A critical encounter impends—an encounter of the type that recalls the uneasiness of a person's vulnerable subconscious self during sleep—a subject of central importance to Rousseau's contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Rousseau's art of drama and fantasy has its own sophistication and, after the artist's death, influenced the development of Surrealism.
ÉDOUARD MANET, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882.
- The Folies-Bergère was a popular café and music hall where Parisians enjoyed their leisure—a characteristic Impressionist subject that broke sharply with tradition, as did Manet's sketchy application of paint. -The central figure in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is a young barmaid who looks out from the canvas but seems detached both from the viewer and the gentleman in a top hat who may be propositioning her. - In front of her, Manet painted a marvelous still life of bottles, flowers, and fruit—all for sale to the bar's customers. In the mirror is the reflection of a gentleman wearing a dapper top hat and carrying an elegant walking stick. He has approached the barmaid, perhaps to order a drink, but more likely to ask the price of her company after the bar closes. Also visible in the mirror, at the upper left corner of the canvas, are the lower legs of a trapeze artist and a woman in the nightclub's balcony watching some other performance through opera glasses.
HONORÉ DAUMIER, The Third-Class Carriage, ca. 1862.
-He depicted them in the unposed attitudes and unplanned arrangements of the millions thronging the modern cities—anonymous, insignificant, dumbly patient with a lot they cannot change. Daumier saw people as they ordinarily appeared, their faces vague, impersonal, and blank—unprepared for any observers. He tried to achieve the real by isolating a random collection of the unrehearsed details of human existence from the continuum of ordinary life. Daumier's vision anticipated the spontaneity and candor of scenes captured with the camera at the end of the century.
JOSEPH KOSUTH, One and Three Chairs, 1965.
-Conceptual Art -Use of language would direct art away from the visual and toward philosophy -Which chair is most real? -Maintained that the "art-fulness" of art lay in the artist's idea, rather than in its final expression. these artists regarded the idea, or concept, as the defining component of the artwork.
GUSTAVE COURBET, Burial at Ornans, 1849.
-A burial of Romanticism, typically genre scenes were small. Although as imposing in scale as a traditional history painting, Burial at Ornans horrified critics because of the ordinary nature of the subject and Courbet's starkly antiheroic composition. -It commemorates a recurring event involving common folk, and it does not ennoble or romanticize death. No one had ever painted a genre subject on this scale. -Burial of Courbet's uncle -Arranged in a wavering line extending across the enormous breadth of the canvas are three groups. -Some of the models were Courbet's father, sisters, and friends. Behind and above the figures are bands of overcast sky and barren cliffs. The dark pit of the grave opens into the viewer's space in the center foreground.
incubus
-A demon or evil spirit supposed to haunt human beings in their bedrooms at night; anything that oppresses or weighs upon one, like a nightmare. -HENRY FUSELI, The Nightmare, 1781.
Synthetic Cubism
-A later phase of Cubism, in which paintings and drawings were constructed from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject, in order to engage the viewer with pictorial issues, such as figuration, realism, and abstraction. -PABLO PICASSO, Still Life with Chair-Caning, 1912.
Lithograph
-A method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. -HONORÉ DAUMIER, Rue Transnonain, 1834.
WILLIAM BLAKE, Ancient of Days, frontispiece of Europe: A Prophecy, 1794.
-A mythological history in which Blake argues that morality and repressive religion led to war, famine, and plague. -For Blake, this figure united the concept of the Creator with that of wisdom as a part of God. - The Almighty leans forward from a fiery orb, peering toward earth and unleashing power through his outstretched left arm into twin rays of light. These emerge between his spread fingers like an architect's measuring instrument—a conception of creation with precedents in Gothic manuscript painting. -Blake merged ideal classical anatomy with the inner dark dreams of Romanticism.
Symbolism
-A person, place or object which has a meaning in itself but suggests other meanings as well -ODILON REDON, The Cyclops, 1898.
Complementary colors
-A primary and secondary color positioned directly opposite each other on the color wheel. Creates a shimmering effect. -JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, The Slave Ship
Pointilism / Divisionism / NeoImpressionism
-A system of painting devised by the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat. The artist separates color into its component parts and then applies the component colors to the canvas in tiny dots (points). The image becomes comprehensible only from a distance, when the viewer's eyes optically blend the pigment dots. Sometimes referred to as divisionism. -GEORGES SEURAT, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886.
EVA HESSE, Hang-Up, 1965-1966.
-Absurdity of life, meaning, feeling, or intellect.
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876.
-Ample time for leisure activities was another facet of the new, industrialized Paris, and scenes of dining and dancing, café-concerts, opera, ballet, and other forms of urban recreation became mainstays of Impressionism. -Dappled by sunlight and shade, artfully blurred into the figures to produce the effect of floating and fleeting light that many Impressionists cultivated.
Surrealism
-An artistic movement that displayed vivid dream worlds and fantastic unreal images -Marc Chagall, Paris Through the Window, 1913.
Abstract Expressionism
-An artistic movement that focused on expressing emotion and feelings through abstract images and colors, lines and shapes. -JACKSON POLLOCK, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950.
ELLSWORTH KELLY, Red Blue Green, 1963.
-An attempt to achieve pure painting- focus on flatness -Wanted to give his paintings an "Object quality"- as a thing in itself, neither abstract nor figurative -Post-Painterly Abstraction -Kelly's emphasis on pure form and color and his impulse to suppress gesture in favor of creating spatial unity have played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America.
Futurism
-An early-20th-century Italian art movement that championed war as a cleansing agent and that celebrated the speed and dynamism of modern technology. - GINO SEVERINI, Armored Train, 1915.
Steina (Vasulka), All Vision 2, 1978.
-An electric panopticon
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Canyon, 1959.
-Anything can be art -Multimedia works that he called combines, like a collage (soooo many materials) -Based on Rembrandt's painting of Jupiter abducting Ganymede to be his cup bearer. Pillow=Ganymedes bare butt in Rembrandt painting.
Pop Art
-Art more accessible to the public, incorporated images from popular culture and commentary on modern society -ANDY WARHOL, Marilyn Diptych, 1962.
BRUCE NAUMAN, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967.
-He wanted to find a medium that would be identified with a nonartistic function. Determined to discover a way to connect objects with words.
Betye Saar: The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972.
-Aunt Jemima a racist caricature -Made from a tchotchke
GIACOMO BALLA, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912.
-Captured motion and movement, a focus of futurist works -Balla achieved the effect of motion by repeating shapes—for example, the dog's legs and tail and the swinging line of the leash. Simultaneity of views, as in Cubism, was central to the Futurist program.
MARK ROTHKO, No. 14, 1961.
-Chromatic Abstraction -Color communicates spiritual/emotional meaning -Shallow space taken from cubism -Fields of color seem to float over the background -Came to believe that references to anything specific in the physical world conflicted with the sublime idea of the universal, supernatural "spirit of myth," which he saw as the core of meaning in art. -Rothko's paintings became compositionally simple, and he increasingly focused on color as the primary conveyor of meaning. In works such as No. 14 (fig. 30-11), Rothko created compelling visual experiences by confining his compositions to two or three large rectangles of pure color with hazy edges.
MORRIS LOUIS, Saraband, 1959.
-Color Field Painting -Stained, unprimed canvas with acrylic paint. -Method of pouring diluted paint onto the surface of unprimed canvas in several series of paintings. Saraband is one of the works in Louis's Veils series. By holding up the canvas edges and pouring diluted acrylic resin, Louis created billowy, fluid, transparent shapes running down the length of the canvas. Louis reduced painting to the concrete fact of the paint-impregnated material.
WILLEM DE KOONING, Woman I, 1950-1952.
-Combined abstraction and representation -Loved pop culture -Intended humor not sexism- "the melodrama of vulgarity" -Out of the jumbled array of slashing lines and agitated patches of color appears a ferocious-looking woman with staring eyes and ponderous breasts. Her toothy smile, inspired by an ad for Camel cigarettes, seems to devolve into a grimace. Female models on advertising billboards partly inspired Woman I and de Kooning's other paintings of women. -He did not consider the figures to be pictures of individual women but images of fertility goddesses or a satiric inversion of the traditional image of Venus, the goddess of love. -Worked on for 2 years, scrapped it almost 200 times.
JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840.
-Complimentary colors - Depicts a 1781 incident involving the slave ship Zong, en route from Africa to Liverpool. The ship's captain, on realizing that his insurance would reimburse him only for slaves lost at sea but not for those who died en route, ordered more than 50 sick and dying slaves to be thrown overboard. Slavery had been a powerful political issue in England for some time. -The artist transformed the sun into an incandescent comet amid flying scarlet clouds. The slave ship moves into the distance, leaving in its wake a turbulent sea choked with the bodies of slaves sinking to their deaths. The relative scale of the minuscule human forms compared with the vast sea and overarching sky reinforces the sense of the sublime, especially the immense power of nature over humans.
PAUL CÉZANNE, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-1904.
-Concern with structure -Concern with being faithful to nature -Keenly aware of painting as a flat surface -His aim was not truth in appearance, especially not photographic truth, nor was it the "truth" of Impressionism. rather, he sought a lasting structure behind the formless and fleeting visual information that the eyes absorb. -Cézanne set out to explore the properties of line, plane, and color, and their interrelationships. -To create the illusion of three-dimensional form and space, cézanne focused on carefully selecting colors. He understood that the visual properties—hue, saturation, and value—of different colors vary (see "Color Theory," page 855). cool colors tend to recede, whereas warm ones advance. -
Formalism
-Concerned with composition rather than subject matter -ELLSWORTH KELLY, Red Blue Green, 1963.
Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977.
-Earthwork/environmental art movement -Encouraged visitors to get out of the museum, but was often in remote locations.
DONALD JUDD, Untitled, 1969.
-Embraced a spare, universal aesthetic corresponding to the core tenets of the minimalist movement. -No meaning behind object and focus on industrial materials -The artist did not intend the work to be metaphorical or symbolic. It is a straightforward declaration of sculpture's objecthood. Judd used Plexiglas because its translucency enables the viewer access to the interior, thereby rendering the sculpture both open and enclosed. This aspect of the design reflects Judd's desire to banish ambiguity or falseness from his works.
Still from Un Chien Andalou, directed by Salvador Dali and Lius Bunel, 1929. Rotting donkeys and grand pianos.
-Emphasis on unreason -art is meant to be an assault on all accepted values -art should not interpret reality but should be part of reality
Marc Chagall, Paris Through the Window, 1913.
-Experimented with fauve color and cubist space -Janus, Roman god of doorways -Real/Romantic Paris VS Dream Paris
Gustave Moreau, The Apparition, 1876-1877.
-Femme Fetale- the destructive temptress of men -The seductive heroine here is the biblical Salome (Mark 6:21-28), who pleased her stepfather, King Herod, by dancing enticingly before him and demanded in return the head of Saint John the Baptist. -The combination of hallucinatory imagery, eroticism, precise drawing, rich color, and opulent setting is the hallmark of Moreau's highly original style. The Apparition and Moreau's other major paintings foreshadow the work of the Surrealists in the next century.
JEAN ARP, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-1917.
-Focus on chance in the artistic process -he took several sheets of paper, tore them into roughly shaped squares, haphazardly dropped them onto a sheet of paper on the floor, and glued them into the resulting arrangement. The rectilinearity of the shapes guaranteed a somewhat regular design (which Arp no doubt enhanced by adjusting the random arrangement into a quasi-grid), but chance had introduced an imbalance that seemed to Arp to restore to his work a special mysterious vitality that he wanted to preserve. -Arp's renunciation of artistic control and reliance on chance when creating his compositions reinforced the anarchy and subversiveness inherent in Dada.
BILL VIOLA, The Crossing, 1996.
-Focuses on sensory perception. His pieces not only heighten viewer awareness of the senses but also suggest an exploration into the spiritual realm. -Fervently believes in art's transformative power and in a spiritual view of human nature, Viola designs works encouraging spectator introspection. His video projects make use of contrasts in scale, shifts in focus, mirrored reflections, extreme slow motion, staccato editing, and multiple or layered screens to achieve dramatic effects.
JACKSON POLLOCK, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950.
-Gestural Abstraction -Consists of rhythmic drips, splatters, and dribbles of paint. The mural-sized fields of energetic skeins of pigment envelop viewers, drawing them into a lacy spider web. Using sticks or brushes, Pollock flung, poured, and dripped paint (not only traditional oil paints but aluminum paints and household enamels as well) onto a section of canvas that he simply unrolled across his studio floor. -Composition is non-hierarchical
HENRY OSSAWA TANNER, The Thankful Poor, 1894.
-He combined Eakins's belief in careful study from nature with a desire to portray with dignity the life of the working people he had been raised among as a minister's son in Pennsylvania. The mood in The Thankful Poor is one of quiet devotion not far removed from the Realism of Millet -Tanner painted the grandfather, grandchild, and main objects in the room in great detail, whereas everything else dissolves into loose strokes of color and light. The lighting reinforces the painting's reverent spirit, with deep shadows intensifying the man's devout concentration. The golden rays pouring in the window illuminate the quiet expression of thanksgiving on the younger face. The deep sense of sanctity evoked here in terms of everyday experience became increasingly important for Tanner. -Sympathy for subjects.
WINSLOW HOMER, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865.
-Homer experienced at first hand the most momentous event of his era—the Civil War. In October 1862, he joined the Union campaign as an artist-reporter for Harper's Weekly. At the end of the war, he painted Veteran in a New Field (fig. 27-35). Although it is simple and direct, Homer's painting is a significant commentary on the effects and aftermath of America's catastrophic national conflict. At the center of the can-vas is a man with his back to the viewer, harvesting wheat. Homer identified him as a veteran by including his uniform and canteen carelessly thrown on the ground in the lower right corner. The man's current occupation, however, is as a farmer, and he has cast aside his former role as a soldier, as did the veterans of America's Revolutionary War in the previous century. -The Civil War veteran's involvement in meaningful and productive work implies a smooth transition from war to peace. . -This postwar transition to work and the fate of disbanded soldiers were national concerns. -Veteran in a New Field also comments symbolically about death. By the 1860s, farmers used cradled scythes to harvest wheat. For this detail, however, Homer rejected realism in favor of symbol-ism. The former soldier's tool is a single-bladed scythe. The artist thus transformed the man who lived through the Civil War into a symbol of Death—the Grim Reaper himself.
James Rosenquist: F- 111 , 1964-65.
-In this billboard-like Pop Art masterpiece, Rosenquist interspersed everyday images with a fighter jet to comment on the connection between the "military-industrial complex" and the American consumer -the F-111 was the latest technological marvel, an enormously costly fighter jet that, for Rosen-quist, was emblematic of the U.s. "military-industrial complex" that produced the Vietnam War, the subject of widespread protest demonstrations at the time.
MARCEL DUCHAMP, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912.
-Influence of chronophotography
EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Death of Sardanapalus, 1826.
-Influenced Impressionists -Inspired by the 1821 narrative poem Sardanapalus by Lord Byron. -Depicted the last hour of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. -he king has just received news of his army's defeat and the enemy's entry into his city. The setting that Delacroix painted is much more tempestuous and crowded than Byron described, and orgiastic destruction has replaced the sacrificial suicide of the poem. Sardanapalus reclines on his funeral pyre, soon to be set alight, and gloomily watches the carrying out of his order to destroy all of his most precious possessions—his women, slaves, horses, and treasure. The king's favorite concubine throws herself on the bed, determined to go up in flames with her master. The Assyrian ruler presides like a genius of evil over the tragic scene. Most conspicuous are the tortured and dying bodies of the harem women. In the foreground, a muscular slave plunges his knife into the neck of one woman. Delacroix filled this awful spectacle of suffering and death with the most daringly difficult and tortuous poses, and chose the richest intensities of hue. With its exotic and erotic overtones and violent Orientalist subject, Death of Sardanapalus tapped into the Romantic fantasies of 19th-century viewers.
Fernand Leger, Study for Three Portraits, 1910 - 1911.
-Influenced by Picasso, Braque, and Cezanne. -Interested in machine forms and motion. -Was an architecture student before shifting to painting -influence of Chronophotography
John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821.
-Inspired Impressionism -Sought truth in landscape, not drama like the sublime. -Painted in short brushstrokes and colors juxtaposed for shimmering effect. -Scene on his father's land in Suffolk. -A nostalgic view of the disappearing English countryside during the Industrial Revolution. constable had a special gift for capturing the texture that climate and weather give to landscapes -The people populating Constable's landscapes blend into the scenes and become one with nature. Rarely does the viewer see workers engaged in tedious labor. -
GIACOMO BALLA, Street Light, c. 1910-11 (dated on painting 1909).
-Inspired by one of the first electric streetlights in Rome and Marinetti Poem
VINCENT VAN GOGH, The Night Café, 1888.
-Interested in the expressive potential of line, color, and pattern. -Van Gogh: "...a place where one can ruins one's self, go mad, or commit a crime... I want to express the power of darkness in a low drinking spot... In an atmosphere like a devil's furnace." -Influence of Japanese prints -He communicated the "madness" of the place by selecting vivid hues whose juxtaposition augmented their intensity. -The thickness, shape, and direction of his brushstrokes created a tactile counterpart to his intense color schemes. He moved the brush vehemently back and forth or at right angles, giving a textilelike effect, or squeezed dots or streaks onto the canvas directly from his paint tube. This bold, almost slapdash attack enhanced the intensity of his colors.
Hugo Ball reciting the poem Karawane at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, 1916.
-Literary dada
HONORÉ DAUMIER, Rue Transnonain, 1834.
-Lithograph -The title refers to the day when, on that street in Paris, an unknown sniper killed a civil guard, part of a government force trying to repress a worker demonstration. Because the fatal shot had come from a workers' housing block, the remaining guards immediately stormed the building and massacred all of its inhabitants. With Goya's power, Daumier created a view of the atrocious slaughter from a sharp angle of vision. But unlike Goya, he depicted not the dramatic moment of execution but the terrible, quiet aftermath. -Used the recent invention of lithography to reach a wide audience for his social criticism and political protest.
Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind I: The Farewells, 1910.
-Locomotive, Radio signals, people embracing, smoke
TONY SMITH, Die, 1962.
-Minimalist Sculpture -Importance of experiencing art, not just viewing it from one angle. -Minimalism- artworks generally lack identifiable subjects, colors, surface textures, and narrative elements, and are perhaps best described simply as three-dimensional objects. By rejecting illusionism and reducing sculpture to basic geometric forms, Smith and other Minimalists emphatically emphasized their art's "objecthood" and concrete tangibility. In so doing, they reduced experience to its most fundamental level, pre-venting viewers from drawing on assumptions or preconceptions when dealing with the art before them.
CLAUDE MONET, Impression: Sunrise, 1872.
-Monet began and completed Impression: Sunrise—a view of the harbor of his boyhood home in le Havre—outdoors. Painting en plein air was how Monet was able to meet his goal of capturing an instantaneous representation of atmosphere and climate, which he concluded was impossible to do in a studio. -The systematic investigation of light and color and the elimination of the traditional distinction between a sketch and a formal painting enabled Monet to paint images that truly conveyed a sense of the momentary and transitory. -Another factor encouraging Monet and some of his contempo-raries to paint outdoors was the introduction of premixed pigments conveniently sold in easily portable tubes. The newly available oil paints gave artists new colors for their work and heightened their sensitivity to the multiplicity of colors in nature. After scrutinizing the effects of light and color on forms, Monet and other late-19th-century painters concluded that local color—an object's color in white light—becomes modified by the quality of the light shining on it, by reflections from other objects, and by the effects that juxtaposed colors produce. -He did achieve remarkably brilliant effects with his characteristically short, choppy brushstrokes, which so accurately catch the vibrating quality of light. -"Impression" refers to a spontaneous sketch. -Moving away from line work. -
ROBERT DELAUNAY, Champs de Mars or The Red Tower, 1911.
-Multiple viewpoints -Tower crumbles in earthquake? -Art historians generally regard the suppression of color as crucial to the success of Cubist painting, but Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Picasso's and Braque's contemporary, worked toward a kind of color Cubism. Apollinaire gave the name Orphism to Delaunay's version of Cubism.
avant-garde
-New and unusual or experimental ideas, especially in the arts, or the people introducing them. -JACKSON POLLOCK, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950.
Abstraction
-Nonrepresentational; forms and colors arranged without reference to the depiction of an object. -PAUL CÉZANNE, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-1904.
PABLO PICASSO, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, June-July 1907.
-OG Name- "The Philosophical Brothel" -Not the first cubist painting, but a catalyst for Cubism -Influence of African masks and "primitive" art -By breaking the figures of the demoiselles into ambiguous planes, as if the viewer were seeing them from more than one place in space at once, Picasso disrupted the standards of Western art since the Renaissance.
MAN RAY, Cadeau (Gift), ca. 1958 (replica of 1921 original).
-Often incorporating found objects in his paintings, sculptures, movies, and photographs. -Shared a keen interest in mass-produced objects and technology, as well as a dedication to exploring the psychological realm of human perception of the exterior world. Like Schwitters, he used the dislocation of ordinary things from their everyday settings to surprise the viewer into new awareness. His displacement of found objects was particularly effective in works such as Cadeau (Gift; fig. 29-37). For this sculpture, with characteristic Dada humor, he equipped a laundry iron with a row of wicked-looking tacks, subverting its proper function. Ray's "gift" would rip to shreds any garment that the recipient tried to press with it. -Assisted Readymade
Georges Braque, Houses at l'Estaque, 1908.
-One of the first cubist paintings -Chose subdued hues in order to focus attention on form.
CAMILLE PISSARRO, La Place du Théâtre Français, 1898.
-Other Impressionists also found the spacious boulevards and avenues that were the result of the "Haussmannization" of Paris attractive subjects for paintings. -Pissarro's approach to recording the new look of Paris was quite dif-ferent from Caillebotte's. Using larger, rougher brushstrokes and a brighter palette, Pisarro captured his visual sensations of a crowded Parisian square viewed from several stories above street level. -Unlike Monet, Pissarro did not seek to record fugitive light effects as much as the fleeting motion of street life, which he achieved through a seemingly casual arrangement of figures and horse-drawn carriages. -Ironically, to accomplish this sense of spontaneity, Pissarro some-times used photography to record the places he wished to paint, as did many of his fellow Impressionists.
JOSEPH BEUYS, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965.
-Performance art should bring forth a spiritual experience in the audience -Honey and gold-leaf on face, piece of iron on right foot -"Even a dead animal preserves more power of intuition than a human being." -aimed at illuminating the condition of modern humanity. -Beuys performed stylized actions evoking a sense of mystery and sacred ritual. He appeared in a room hung with his drawings, cradling a dead hare to which he spoke softly. - In this manner, he took on the role of the shaman, an individual with special spiritual powers. As a shaman, Beuys believed he was acting to help revolutionize human thought so that each human being could become a truly free and creative person. But the impossibility of communicating with a dead hare symbolized the difficulty of achieving successful exchanges among alienated people in modern society.
CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH, Abbey in the Oak Forest, 1810.
-Pictorial equivalent of a solemn requiem. Under a winter sky, through the leafless oaks of a snow-covered cemetery, a procession of monks bears a coffin into the ruins of a Gothic church that Fried-rich based on the remains of Eldana Abbey near Greifswald. -The reverential mood of this winter scene with a ruined Gothic church and cemetery demands the silence appropriate to sacred places. -The emblems of death are everywhere—the season's desolation, the leaning crosses and tombstones, the black of mourning that the grieving wear, the skeletal trees, and the destruction that time has wrought on the church. The painting is a kind of meditation on human mortality. -The human figure plays an insignificant role.
ODILON REDON, The Cyclops, 1898.
-Redon adapted the Impressionist palette and stippling brushstroke for a very different purpose—the representation of dreamlike narratives. -Redon represented the mythological one-eyed giant Polyphemus emerging from behind a rocky outcropping in a landscape with a rich profusion of fresh saturated hues that harmonized with the mood that Redon felt fitted the subject. In Homer's Odyssey, Polyphemus is a monstrous giant whom the Greek hero Odysseus must vanquish on his journey home from Troy. Redon chose, however, the less familiar tale of Polyphemus's love for the nymph Galatea.
GEORGES SEURAT, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886.
-Pointillism -he subjects of Seurat's paintings of the 1880s were essentially Impressionist themes, but unlike the Impressionists, Seurat depicted modern life in a resolutely intellectual way. He devised a disciplined and painstaking system of painting focused on color analysis. -less concerned with the recording of immediate color sensations than he was with their careful and systematic organization into a new kind of pictorial order. Calculated arrangement based on scientific color theory. -The artist then applies these pure component colors to the canvas in tiny dots (points) or daubs. Thus the shapes, figures, and spaces in the image become comprehensible only from a distance when the viewer's eyes blend the many pigment dots. - La Grande Jatte is an island in the Seine River near Asnières, one of late-19th-century Paris's rapidly growing industrial suburbs. It is the setting for a typically Impressionist recreational theme, populated by "modern people" from various classes and wearing different kinds of clothes. A sleeveless worker lounges in the left foreground next to a middle-class couple. In the center is a little girl in a spotless white dress accompanied by her fashionably attired nanny. Also present is a woman with a monkey on a leash who is almost certainly a prostitute. In short, the Sunday visitors to La Grande Jatte are a cross-section of Parisian society in the 1880s. -Produced a carefully composed and painted image, in sharp contrast to Impressionist "sketches," incorporating repeated motifs—for example, similarly dressed women, identical parasols—to establish a rhythmic movement.
ANDY WARHOL, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962.
-Pop art -Sensibility and visual rhetoric of advertising and the mass media. -Silk-screen technique enabled Warhol to print the image endlessly (although he varied each bottle slightly). The repetition and redundancy of the Coke bottle reflect the saturation of this product in American society—in homes, at work, literally everywhere. -So immersed was Warhol in a culture of mass production that he not only produced numerous canvases of the same image but also named his studio "the Factory."
ANDY WARHOL, Marilyn Diptych, 1962.
-Pop art -Sensibility and visual rhetoric of advertising and the mass media. -Silk-screen technique enabled Warhol to print the image endlessly (although he varied each bottle slightly). The repetition and redundancy of the Coke bottle reflect the saturation of this product in American society—in homes, at work, literally everywhere. -So immersed was Warhol in a culture of mass production that he not only produced numerous canvases of the same image but also named his studio "the Factory."
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, The Poor Fisherman, 1881.
-Puvis served as a Salon juror until he resigned in 1872 to protest the narrowness of the other jurors. Puvis, nevertheless, was no admirer of realism or Impressionism, producing instead an ornamental and reflective art incorporating classical imagery—a categorical rejection of the realist and Impressionist focus on the everyday world.
MARCEL DUCHAMP, Fountain, (second version), 1950 (original version produced 1917).
-Readymade -Mass-produced objects that the dada artist modified. In Fountain, he conferred the status of art on a urinal and forced people to see the object in a new light. -The creation of readymades, Duchamp insisted, was free from any consideration of either good or bad taste, qualities shaped by a society that he and other Dada artists found aesthetically bankrupt. Perhaps his most outrageous readymade was Fountain (fig. 29-26), a porcelain urinal presented on its back, signed "R. Mutt," and dated (1917). The "artist's signature" was, in fact, a witty pseudonym derived from the Mott plumbing company's name and that of the taller man of the then-popular Mutt and Jeff comic-strip duo -The "art" of this "artwork" lay in the artist's choice of object, which had the effect of conferring the status of art on it and forcing viewers to work.
Minimalism
-an art movement in sculpture and painting that began in the 1950s and emphasized extreme simplification of form and color -TONY SMITH, Die, 1962.
THÉODORE GÉRICAULT, Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819.
-Rejected Neoclassical compositional principles and, in the Romantic spirit, presented a jumble of writhing bodies in every attitude of suffer-ing, despair, and death. -Immortalized the July 2, 1816, shipwreck off the Mauritanian coast of the French frigate Medusa, which ran aground on a reef due to the incompetence of its inexperienced captain, a political appointee. The captain and his officers safely abandoned the ship. In an attempt to survive, 147 passengers built a makeshift raft from pieces of the disintegrating frigate. The raft drifted for 13 days, and the starving survivors dwindled to 15, in part because of cannibalism. Finally, the ship Argus spotted the raft and rescued those still alive. This horrendous event was political dynamite once it became public knowledge.
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, "When I Put My Hands On Your Body", 1990.
-Responded to the devastating impact of AIDS in the gay community by producing deeply moving works of art. -Wojnarowicz overlaid a photograph of a pile of skeletal remains with evenly spaced typed commentary communicating his feelings about watch ing a loved one dying of AIDS. Wojnarowicz movingly describes the effects of AIDS on the human body and soul. -Paralleled the use of both words and images in advertising.
Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910.
-Rousseau was a "primitive" without leaving Paris—a self-taught amateur who turned to painting full-time only after his retirement from service in the French government.
JOHN SINGER SARGENT, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882.
-Sargent developed a looser, more dashing Realist painting style, in contrast to Eakins's carefully rendered details. -The four girls (the children of one of Sargent's close friends) appear in a hall and small drawing room in their Paris home. The informal, eccentric arrangement of their slight figures suggests how much at ease they are within this familiar space and with objects such as the enormous Japanese vases, the red screen, and the fringed rug, whose scale subtly emphasizes the children's diminutive stature. Sargent must have known the Boit daughters well. Relaxed and trustful, they gave the artist an opportunity to record a gradation of young innocence. He sensitively captured the naive, wondering openness of the little girl in the foreground, the grave artlessness of the 10-year-old child, and the slightly self-conscious poise of the adolescents. -Main interest was portraits of middle class/professional men. -Celebrated the french tradition of teaching in clinics. -Surgery for bone infection. -Masculine intellectual calm VS emotional response of female.
GINO SEVERINI, Armored Train, 1915.
-Severini's glistening armored train with protruding cannon reflects the Futurist faith in the cleansing action of war. The painting captures the dynamism and motion central to the Futurist manifesto
ROBERT SMITHSON, Spiral Jetty, 1970.
-Spiral form reflects spiral form of Great Salt Lake salt crystals -Rise and fall of tide is part of the artwork - He wanted to avoid the arrogance of an artist merely imposing an unrelated concept on the site.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET, The Gleaners, 1857.
-Strong political statement -Depicted three impoverished women—members of the lowest level of peasant society—performing the backbreaking task of gleaning. Landowning nobles traditionally permitted peas-ants to glean, or collect, the wheat scraps left in the field after the harvest. -Millet characteristically placed his large figures in the fore-ground, against a broad sky. Although the field stretches back to a rim of haystacks, cottages, trees, and distant workers and a flat horizon, the gleaners quietly doing their tedious and time-consuming work dominate the canvas.
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of D. H. Kahnweiler,1910.
-Subject matter of cubist art is unimportant. -Influenced by x-ray technology
Readymade
-an everyday object presented as a work of art -MARCEL DUCHAMP, Fountain, (second version), 1950 (original version produced 1917).
PABLO PICASSO, Still Life with Chair-Caning, 1912.
-Synthetic Cubism -Interest in Collage -Use of letters in art a new thing introduced by cubists
Francisco Goya, The Third of May, 1808, 1814.
-The Spanish people, finally recognizing the French as invaders, sought a way to expel the foreign troops. On May 2, 1808, Spaniards attacked Napoleon's soldiers in a chaotic and violent clash. In retaliation and as a show of force, the French responded the next day by rounding up and executing Spanish citizens. This tragic event is the subject of Goya's most famous painting, Third of May, 1808. -Depicted the anonymous murderous wall of Napole-]onic soldiers ruthlessly executing the unarmed and terrified Spanish peasants. The artist encouraged empathy for the Spaniards by portraying horrified expressions and anguish on their faces, endowing them with a humanity lacking in the faceless French firing squad in the shadows. Moreover, the peasant about to be shot throws his arms out in a cruciform gesture reminiscent of Christ's position on the cross. The anonymous martyr's right hand also bears Christ's stigmata. -Enhanced the emotional drama of the massacre by sharply contrasting the darkness of the night with the focused illumination of the French squad's lantern and by extending the time frame depicted. Although Goya captured the specific moment when one man is about to be executed, he also recorded the bloody bodies of others lying dead on the ground. Still others have been herded together to be shot in a few moments. The horrible massacre will continue indefinitely.
SALVADOR DALÍ, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.
-The Surrealists' exploration of the human psyche and dreams reached new heights in the works of Spanish-born Salvador Dalí. -Key is in the method not entirely the appearance. - A haunting allegory of empty space where time has ended. An eerie, never-setting sun illuminates the barren landscape. An amorphous creature draped with a limp pocket watch sleeps in the foreground. Another watch hangs from the branch of a dead tree springing unexpectedly from a blocky architectural form. A third watch hangs half over the edge of the rectangular form, beside a small timepiece resting dial-down on the block's surface. Ants swarm mysteriously over the small watch, while a fly walks along the face of its large neighbor, almost as if this assembly of watches were decaying organisms—soft and sticky. Dalí rendered every detail of this dreamscape with precise control, striving to make the world of his paintings convincingly real—in his words, to make the irrational concrete.
KAZUO SHIRAGA, Making a Work with His Own Body, 1955.
-The act of painting turned into a performance -Art is not a transformative process, it cannot change the world.
VINCENT VAN GOGH, Starry Night, 1889.
-The artist did not rep-resent the sky's appearance. Rather, he communicated his feelings about the electrifying vastness of the universe, filled with whirling and exploding stars, with the earth and humanity huddling beneath it. The church nestled in the center of the village is, perhaps, van Gogh's attempt to express or reconcile his conflicted views about religion.
GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877.
-The brushwork in his 1877 Paris: A Rainy Day bears little resemblance to Monet's or Manet's, but the subject is unmistakably Impressionist. -Napoleon III ordered Paris rebuilt. The emperor named Baron Georges Haussmann (1809-1891), superintendent of the Seine district, to oversee he entire project, which the emperor hoped would establish Paris as a world capital surpassing London. In addition to new water and sewer systems, new parks and paved plazas, street lighting, and new residential and commercial buildings, a major component of the new Paris was the creation of the wide, open boulevards seen in Caillebotte's painting. These great avenues, whose construction caused the demolition of thousands of old buildings and streets, transformed medieval Paris into the present-day city, with its superb vistas and wide, uninterrupted arteries for the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. -His composition is, save for the central lamppost, strongly asymmetrical and in violation of academic norms of design. -The frame also cuts off parts of Caillebotte's figures, underscoring that the men and women in this painting are moving and that this is a transitory moment in the life of the city and its residents.
Assisted Readymade
-The combining of two or more found objects - by taking them out of their normal context, each takes on new meaning -MAN RAY, Cadeau (Gift), ca. 1958 (replica of 1921 original).
Analytic Cubism
-The first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in which the artists analyzed form from every possible vantage point to combine the various views into one pictorial whole. -PABLO PICASSO, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, June-July 1907.
Dada
-artistic movement in which artists rejected tradition and produced works that often shocked their viewers -MARCEL DUCHAMP, Fountain, (second version), 1950 (original version produced 1917).
PAUL GAUGUIN, The Vision after the Sermon or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888.
-The painting shows Breton women, wearing their starched white Sunday caps and black dresses, visualizing the sermon they have just heard in church on Jacob's encounter with the Holy Spirit (Gen. 32:24-30). Joining the women, at the far right, is a tonsured monk who has Gauguin's features. - Gauguin departed from optical realism and composed the picture elements to focus the viewer's attention on the idea and intensify its message. The images are not what the Impressionist eye would have seen and replicated but what Gauguin's memory recalled and his imagination modified. Thus the artist twisted the perspective and allotted most of the space to emphasize the innocent faith of the unquestioning women, and he shrank Jacob and the angel, wrestling in a ring enclosed by a Breton stone fence. -Gauguin did not unify the picture with a horizon perspective, light and shade, or naturalistic use of color. Instead, he abstracted the scene into a pattern, with the diagonal tree limb symbolically dividing the spiritual from the earthly realm. Pure unmodulated color fills flat planes and shapes bounded by firm line: white caps, black dresses, and the red field of combat. -Influence of Japanese prints, stained glass -For Gauguin, the artist's power to determine the colors in a painting was a central element of creativity. However, whereas van Gogh's heavy, thick brushstrokes were an important component of his expressive style, Gauguin's color areas appear flatter, often visually dissolving into abstract patches or patterns.
HENRY FUSELI, The Nightmare, 1781.
-The transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism marked a shift in emphasis from reason to feeling. Fuseli was among the first painters to depict the dark terrain of the human subconscious. -Incubus- Mara, a form of an incubus in northern mythology- suffocated sleepers. -Painting on the back- Portrait of Anna Landholt, who was not allowed to marry Fuseli bc of her parents.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Mist, ca. 1818.
-The wanderer stands outside the world he is observing -Because Friedrich chose a point of view on the level of the man's head, the viewer has the sensation of hovering in space behind him—an impossible position that enhances the aura of mystery that the scene conveys. -Perfectly expresses the Romantic notion of the sublime in nature.
JUDY CHICAGO, The Dinner Party, 1979.
-Triangular form: Traditional symbol of women and the Goddess -39 guests at the table...999 names of women on the floor -Vaginal forms/Butterfly motif on the plates -Goal was to educate the public about women's role in history and the fine arts and to establish a respect for women and their art. Chicago sought to forge a new kind of art expressing women's experiences and to find a way to make that art accessible to a large audience. -craft techniques used by artist traditionally practiced by women, to celebrate the achievements and contributions that women had made throughout history - The notion of a dinner party also alludes to women's traditional role as homemakers.
FAITH RINGGOLD, Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, 1983.
-Tribute to her mother, fashion designer Wili Posey -Provided incisive commentary on the realities of racial prejudice. She increasingly incorporated references to gender as well and, in the 1970s, turned to fabric as the predominant material in her art. Using fabric enabled Ringgold to make more pointed reference to the domestic sphere, traditionally associated with women. -Aunt Jemima tells the witty story of the family of the stereotypical black "mammy" in the mind of the public, but here Jemima is a successful African American businesswoman. Ringgold narrates the story using black dialect interspersed with embroidered portraits and traditional patterned squares. Aunt Jemima, while incorporating autobiographical references, also speaks to the larger issues of the his-tory of African American culture and the struggles of women to over-come oppression.
EDGAR DEGAS, Ballet Rehearsal, 1874.
-Used photography -Degas was not concerned with light and atmosphere. -Specialized in indoor subjects and made many preliminary studies for his finished paintings. Degas's interests were primarily recording body movement and exploring unusual angles of viewing. -he Rehearsal is the antithesis of a classically balanced composition. The center is empty, and the floor takes up most of the canvas surface. At the margins, Degas arranged the ballerinas and their teachers in a seemingly random manner. As in other Impressionist paintings, the cutting off of figures at the left and right enhances the sense that the viewer is witnessing a fleeting moment. - The implied position of that viewer is in a balcony looking down at the figures, as opposed to the head-on views of statuesque figures that were the norm in traditional paintings. -Japanese woodblock prints were another inspirational source for paintings such as The Rehearsal.
Romantic Realism
-Using the Romantic approach to painting to depict the ills of society -JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, The Slave Ship
Post-Painterly Abstraction
-had a tighter pictorial control and coolly detached rationality. There was little evidence of the painter's hand. --ELLSWORTH KELLY, Red Blue Green, 1963.
Postmodernism
-rejection of elitist formalist movement -deconstruction of art -JUDY CHICAGO, The Dinner Party, 1979.
Aerial or atmospheric perspective
-the use of light, atmosphere, and haziness to indicate depth or distance -CLAUDE MONET, Impression: Sunrise, 1872.
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914.
De Chirico found hidden reality revealed through strange juxtapositions, such as those seen on late autumn afternoons in the city of Turin, when the long shadows of the setting sun transformed vast open squares and silent public monuments into what the painter called "metaphysical towns.
ADOLPHE-WILLIAM BOUGUEREAU, Nymphs and Satyr, 1873.
Not seen as pornographic or scandalous.
environmental art (also called earthworks)
ROBERT SMITHSON, Spiral Jetty, 1970.