ART Hist Final Background (prt2)

JAN VERMEER, Woman Holding a Balance, c.1664 [Northern Baroque]20-19

A young woman delicately holds an empty pair of scales in her right hand. She seems to be waiting for them to balance out before she weighs something, probably the gold coins at the edge of the table. Also on the table are some jewels, pearl necklaces and a gold chain. On the far wall hangs a painting of the Last Judgment (right) while: on the left wall facing the woman is a mirror. The contrast between the valuable objects on the table, the Last Judgment and the scales, symbols of the Judgment itself, are intended to remind the viewer of the importance of resisting the temptation of earthly riches and living moderately in order to obtain salvation. The calmness of the young woman's feature's indicates that she is capable of living according to these principles. The subject of moderation appears in other paintings by Vermeer, such as The Girl with the Wine Glass, in which the stained-glass window features a female figure who can be identified as an allegory of Temperance. In the present work, the contrast between the various objects is what fills the painting with meaning. While the presence of the Last Judgment indicates that the message of this painting has religious connotations, we should not forget its similarities to other works by Vermeer of the mid-1660s; such as Young Woman with a Water Jug, and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. These two works, as with the present one, depict a young woman in a thoughtful attitude within a domestic interior accompanied by symbolic elements. In conclusion, we are dealing with images in which the artist imbues an everyday context with an atmosphere of idealization and calm that can be related to universal issues such as purity, love and, in this case, moderation.

JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY, Paul Revere, 1768-70 [American Realism]21-22

American artist John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) matured as a painter in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Like West, Copley later emigrated to England, where he absorbed the fashionable English portrait style. But unlike Grand Manner portraits, Copley's Paul Revere (fig. 21-22), painted before the artist left Boston, con- veys a sense of directness and faithfulness to visual fact that marked the taste for honesty and plainness noted by many late-18th- and 19th-century visitors to America. When Copley painted his likeness, Revere was not yet the familiar hero of the American Revolution. In this picture, he is a working professional silversmith. The setting is plain, the lighting clear and revealing. Revere sits in his shirtsleeves, bent over a teapot in progress. He pauses and turns his head to look the observer straight in the eyes. The painter treated the reflections in the polished wood of the tabletop with as much care as he did Revere's figure, his tools, and the teapot resting on its leather graver's pillow. Copley gave special prominence to Revere's eyes by reflecting intense reddish light onto the darkened side of his face and hands. The informality and the sense of the moment link this painting to contemporaneous English and Continental portraits. But the spare style and the emphasis on the sitter's down-to-earth character differ- entiate this American work from its European counterparts.

ROGIER VAN DER WEYDEN, St. Luke Drawing the Virgin, c.1435-40 [Northern Renaissance]15-1

As noted, in the 15th century, in addition to their primary function as "trade unions," guilds played an increasingly important role in com- munity life and often became major patrons of art in their cities (see "The Artist's Profession in Flanders," page 446). Christus went to great lengths to produce a historically credible image. For example, the variety of objects depicted in the painting serves as advertisement for the goldsmiths' guild. Included are the goldsmiths' raw materials (precious stones, beads, crystal, coral, and seed pearls) scattered among finished products (rings, buckles, and brooches). The pewter vessels on the upper shelves are donation pitchers, which town leaders gave to distinguished guests. All these meticulously painted objects not only attest to the centrality and importance of goldsmiths to both the secular and sacred commu- nities but also enhance the naturalism of the painting. The convex mirror in the foreground showing another couple and a street with houses serves to extend the painting's space into the viewer's space, further creating the illusion of reality, as in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait (fig. 15-7).

THOMAS JEFFERSON, Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1770-1806 [Neoclassicism] 21-31

Because the appeal of Neoclassicism was due in part to the values with which it was associated—morality, ideal- ism, patriotism, and civic virtue—it is not surprising that in the new American republic, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) spearheaded a movement to adopt Neoclassicism as the national architectural style. Jefferson—economist, educational theorist, gifted amateur architect, as well as statesman (see "Thomas Jefferson, Patron and Practitioner," above)—admired Palladio immensely and read carefully the Italian architect's Four Books of Architecture. Later, while minister to France, he studied 18th-century French classical architecture and city planning and visited the Maison Carrée (fig. 7-32), an ancient Roman temple at Nîmes. After his European sojourn, Jefferson decided to completely remodel Monticello (fig. 21-31), his home near Charlot- tesville, Virginia, which he originally had designed in a different style. The final version of Monticello is somewhat reminiscent of Palladio's Villa Rotonda (fig. 17-28) and of Chiswick House (fig. 21-29), but its materials are the local wood and brick used in Virginia. The single- story home with an octagonal dome set above the central drawing room behind a pediment-capped columnar porch sits on a wooded plot of land with mountain vistas all around. (Monticello means "hill- ock" or "little mountain" in Italian.) The setting fulfilled another of Jefferson's goals—to build for himself a country villa inspired by the ones described by the first-century Roman author Pliny (s

JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, Oath of the Horatii, 1784 [Neoclassicism]21-26

David concurred with the Enlightenment belief that the subject of an artwork should have a moral. Paint- ings representing noble deeds in the past could inspire virtue in the resent. A milestone painting in the Neoclassical master's career, Oath of the Horatii (fig. 21-26), depicts a story from pre-Republican Rome, the heroic phase of Roman history. The topic was not too obscure for David's audience. Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) had retold this story of conflict between love and patriotism, recounted by the ancient Roman historian Livy, in a play performed in Paris several years earlier. According to the story, the leaders of the war- ring cities of Rome and Alba decided to resolve their conflicts in a series of encounters waged by three representatives from each side. The Romans chose as their champions the three Horatius brothers, who had to face the three sons of the Curatius family from Alba. A sister of the Horatii, Camilla, was the bride-to-be of one of the Cura- tius sons, and the wife of the youngest Horatius was the sister of the Curatii. David's painting shows the Horatii as they swear on their swords, held high by their father, to win or die for Rome, oblivious to the anguish and sorrow of the Horatius women. Oath of the Horatii is a paragon of the Neoclassical style. Not only does the subject matter deal with a narrative of patriotism and sacrifice excerpted from Roman history, but the painter also employed formal devices to present the image with force and clarity. The action unfolds in a shallow space much like a stage set- ting, defined by a severely simple architectural framework (compare fig. 21-1). David deployed his statuesque and carefully modeled figures across the space, close to the foreground, in a manner remi- niscent of ancient relief sculpture. The rigid, angular, and virile forms of the men on the left effectively contrast with the soft curvilinear shapes of the distraught women on the right. This juxtaposition visually pits the virtues that Enlightenment leaders ascribed to men, such as courage, patriotism, and unwavering loyalty to a cause, against the emotions of love, sorrow, and despair expressed by the women in the painting. The French viewing audience per- ceived such emotionalism as characteristic of the female nature. The message was clear and of a type readily identifiable to the pre- revolutionary French public. The picture created a sensation at its first exhibition in Paris in 1785. Although David had painted it under royal patronage and did not intend the painting as a revolutionary statement, Oath of the Horatii aroused his audience to patriotic zeal. The Neoclassical style soon became the semiofficial voice of the French Revolution.

EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Death of Sardanapalus, 1826 [Romanticism]22-15

Delacroix's 1827 Death of Sardanapa- lus (fig. 22-15) is perhaps the grandest Romantic pictorial drama ever painted. Although inspired by the 1821 narrative poem Sardanapa- lus by Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824), the painting does not illustrate that text faithfully. Delacroix depicted the last hour of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (r. 668-627 bce; fig. 2-23), whom the Greeks called Sardanapalus. The 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 con- spicuous 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.

EDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863 [Realism]22-32

Even more scandalous to the French viewing public, how- ever, was Manet's Olympia (fig. 22-33), painted the same year and also loosely based on a painting by Titian—Venus of Urbino (fig. 17-39). Manet's subject was a young white prostitute. (Olympia was a com- mon "professional" name for prostitutes in 19th-century France.) She reclines on a bed that extends across the full width of the painting (and beyond) and is nude except for a thin black ribbon tied around her neck, a bracelet on her arm, an orchid in her hair, and fashionable slippers on her feet. Like the seated nude in Le Déjeuner (Victorine Meurent served again as Manet's model), Olympia meets the viewer's eye with a look of cool indifference. The only other figure in the painting is a black maid, who presents Olympia a bouquet of flowers from a client. Olympia horrified the public and critics alike. One reviewer of the Salon of 1865 (remarkably, the jury accepted Manet's painting for inclusion) described the painter as "the apostle of the ugly and repulsive."7 Although images of prostitutes were not unheard of dur- ing this period, the shamelessness of Olympia and her look verging on defiance shocked viewers. The depiction of a black woman was also not new to painting, but the French public perceived Manet's inclusion of both a black maid and a nude prostitute as evoking moral depravity, inferiority, and animalistic sexuality. The contrast of the black servant with the fair-skinned courtesan also conjured racial divisions. An anonymous critic in Le Monde Illustré described Olympia as "a courtesan, with dirty hands and wrinkled feet . . . her body has the livid tint of a cadaver displayed in the morgue; her outlines are drawn in charcoal and her greenish, bloodshot eyes appear to be provoking the public, protected all the while by a hideous Negress."8 From this and similar reviews, it is clear that critics and the pub- lic were responding not solely to the subject matter but to Manet's artistic style as well. The painter's brushstrokes are much rougher and the shifts in tonality are far more abrupt than those found in traditional aca- demic painting.

JULES HARDOUIN-MANSART and CHARLES LE BRUN, Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors), Palace of Louis XIV, Versailles, France, ca. 1680 [Rococo]20-27

Every detail of the extremely rich decoration of the palace's interior received careful attention. The architects and decorators designed everything from wall paintings to doorknobs in order to reinforce the splendor of Versailles and to exhibit the very finest sense of artisanship. of the literally hundreds of rooms within the palace, the most famous is the Galerie des Glaces, or Hall of Mirrors (fig. 20-27), designed by Jules HardouinMansart (1646-1708) and Le Brun. This hall overlooks Le Nôtre's park (fig. 2026) from the second floor and extends along most of the width of the central block. although deprived of its original sumptuous furniture, which included gold and silver chairs and bejeweled trees, the 240footlong Galerie des Glaces retains much of its splendor today. Hundreds of mirrors, set into the wall opposite the windows, alleviate the hall's tunnellike quality and illusionistically extend the width of the room. The mirror, that ultimate source of illusion, was a favorite element of Baroque interior design. Here, it also enhanced the dazzling extrava gance of the great festivals that Louis XiV was so fond of hosting. From the Galerie des Glaces, the king and his guests could enjoy a sweeping vista down the treelined central axis of the Versailles park and across terraces, lawns, pools, and lakes toward the horizon.

PABLO PICASSO, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 [Cubism]24-1

For many years, Picasso showed Les Demoiselles only to other painters. One of the first to see it was Georges Braque (1882-1963), a Fauve painter who found it so challenging that he began to rethink his own painting style. Using the painting's revolutionary elements as a point of departure, together Braque and Picasso formulated Cubism around 1908 in the belief that the art of painting had to move far beyond the descrip- tion of visual reality. Cubism represented a radical turning point in the history of art, nothing less than a dismissal of the pictorial illu- sionism that had dominated Western art since the Renaissance. The Cubists rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world. As Picasso once explained: "I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them."5 Together, Picasso and Braque pursued the analy- sis of form central to Cézanne's artistic explorations (see page 740 and figs. 23-22 to 23-23A) by dissecting everything around them into its many constituent features, which they then recomposed, by a new logic of design, into a coherent, independent aesthetic pic- ture. The Cubists' rejection of accepted artistic practice illustrates both the period's avant-garde critique of pictorial convention and the artists' dwindling faith in a safe, concrete Newtonian world in the face of the physics of Einstein and others

GEORGES BRAQUE, The Portuguese, 1911 [Cubism]24-13

Georges Braque's painting The Portuguese (fig. 24-13) exempli- fies Analytic Cubism. The subject is a Portuguese musician whom the artist recalled seeing years earlier in a bar in Marseilles. Braque dissected the man and his instrument and placed the resulting forms in dynamic interaction with the space around them. Unlike the Fauves and German Expressionists, who used vibrant colors, the Cubists chose subdued hues—here solely brown tones—in order to focus attention on form. In The Portuguese, Braque carried his analysis so far that viewers must work diligently to discover clues to the subject. The construction of large intersecting planes suggests the forms of a man and a guitar. Smaller shapes interpenetrate and hover in the large planes. The way Braque treated light and shadow reveals his departure from conventional artistic practice. Light and dark passages suggest both chiaroscuro modeling and transparent planes that enable viewers to see through one level to another. Solid forms emerge only to be canceled almost immediately by a different reading of the subject.

DUANE HANSON, Supermarket Shopper, 1970 [Superrealism]25-33

Hanson perfected a casting technique that enabled him to create life-size figurative sculptures that many viewers mistake at first for real people. Hanson began by making plas- ter molds from live models and then filled the molds with polyester resin. After the resin hardened, he removed the outer molds and cleaned, painted with an airbrush, and decorated the sculptures with wigs, clothes, and other accessories. These works, such as Supermarket Shopper (fig. 25-33), depict stereo- typical average Americans, striking chords with the public specifically because of their familiarity. Hanson explained his choice of imagery: The subject matter that I like best deals with the familiar lower- and middle-class American types of today. To me, the resignation, empti- ness and loneliness of their existence captures the true reality of life for these people. . . . I want to achieve a certain tough realism which speaks of the fascinating idiosyncrasies of our time.1

HONORÉ DAUMIER, Rue Transnonain, 1834 [Realism]22-29

In 1798, the German printmaker Alois senefelder (1771-1834) created the first prints using stone instead of metal plates or wood blocks. In contrast to earlier printing techniques (see pages 457 and 458), in which the artist applied ink either to a raised or incised surface, in lithography (Greek, "stone writing or drawing") the printing and non- printing areas of the plate are on the same plane. The chemical phenomenon fundamental to lithography is the repel- lence of oil and water. The lithographer uses a greasy, oil-based crayon to draw directly on a stone plate and then wipes water onto the stone, which clings only to the areas the drawing does not cover. Next, the artist rolls oil-based ink onto the stone, which adheres to the drawing but is repelled by the water. When the artist presses the stone against paper, only the inked area—the drawing—transfers to the paper. color lithogra- phy requires multiple plates, one for each color, and the printmaker must take special care to make sure each impression lines up perfectly with the previous one so that each color prints in its proper place. one of the earliest masters of this new printmaking process was Honoré daumier, whose lithographs (figs. 22-29 and 22-49A), often published in leading French journals such as Caricature and L'association mensuelle, reached an audience of unprecedented size. daumier used the recent invention of lithography to reach a wide audience for his social criticism and political protest. This print records the horrific 1834 mas- sacre in a workers' housing block.

SALVADOR DALÍ, The Persistence of Memory, 1931 [Surrealism]24-55

In The Persistence of Memory (fig. 24-55), Dalí created 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 mysteri- ously 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.

CLAUDE MONET, Impression: Sunrise, 1872 [Impressionism]23-2

In striking contrast to traditional studio artists, Monet began and completed Impression: Sunrise (fig. 23-2)—a view of the harbor of his boyhood home in le Havre—outdoors. closer to Paris, he often set up his easel on the banks of the Seine (fig. 23-2A) or in a boat on the river (fig. 23-2B). Painting en plein air was how Monet was able to meet his goal of capturing an instantaneous rep- resentation of atmosphere and climate, which he concluded was impossible to do in a studio. of course, landscape painters had always drawn and made preliminary color studies outdoors and then used those sketches to produce formal paintings in their studios. Finish- ing as well as beginning his landscapes outdoors sharpened Monet's focus on the roles that light and color play in the way nature appears to the eye. 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. lilla cabot Perry (1848-1933), a student of Monet's late in his career, gave this descrip- tion of Monet's approach: I remember his once saying to me: "When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks tto you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you."* 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 col- ors produce. Shadows do not appear gray or black, as many earlier painters thought, but seem to be composed of colors modified by reflections or other conditions. If artists use complementary colors (see "19th-century color Theory," page 735) side by side over large enough areas, the colors intensify each other, unlike the effect of small quantities of adjoining mixed pigments, which blend into neutral tones. Furthermore, the "mixing" of colors by juxtaposing them directly on a white canvas without any preliminary sketch—also a sharp break from traditional painting practice—produces a more intense hue than the same colors mixed on the palette. Although it is not true, as some have maintained, that Monet exclusively used primary hues, placing them side by side to create secondary colors (blue and yellow, for example, to create green), he did achieve remarkably brilliant effects with his characteristically short, choppy brushstrokes, which so accurately catch the vibrating quality of light. The reason for much of the early adverse criticism leveled at Monet's paintings was that they lacked the polished surfaces and sharp contours of academic painting. In Monet's canvases, in sharp contrast to traditional oil paintings, the forms take on clarity only when the eye fuses the brushstrokes at a certain distance.

ANTOINE WATTEAU, Return from Cythera, 1717-19 [Rococo]21-7

In the early 18th century, the centralized and grandiose palace-based culture of Baroque France gave way to the much more intimate Rococo culture based in the townhouses of paris. There, aristocrats and intellectuals gathered for witty conversation in salons featuring delicate colors, sinuous lines, gilded mirrors, elegant furniture, and small paintings and sculptures. ■ The leading Rococo painter was Antoine Watteau, whose usually small canvases feature light colors and elegant figures in ornate costumes moving gracefully through lush landscapes. His fête galante paintings depict the outdoor amusements of French high society. ■ Watteau's successors included François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who carried on the Rococo style late into the 18th century. In Italy, Giambattista Tiepolo adapted the Rococo manner to huge ceiling frescoes in the Baroque traditio

GUSTAVE COURBET, Burial at Ornans, 1849 [Realism]22-27

Many art historians regard Courbet's Burial at Ornans (fig. 22-27) as his masterpiece. The huge (10-by-22-foot) canvas depicts a funeral set in a bleak provincial landscape outside the artist's hometown near Besançon in eastern France. Attending the funeral are the types of ordinary people that Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) presented in their novels. While a robed clergyman recites the Office of the Dead, those attending cluster around the excavated gravesite. Although the painting has the imposing scale of a traditional history painting, the subject's ordinariness and the starkly antiheroic composition horrified critics. Burial at Ornans is not a record of the burial of a Christian martyr or a heroic soldier. It commemorates a recurring event involving common folk, and it does not ennoble or romanti- cize death. No one had ever painted a genre subject on this scale. Furthermore, Courbet had the audacity to submit Burial at Ornans to the 1851 Salon in the category of history painting, but declined to identify the deceased. Arranged in a wavering line extending across the enormous breadth of the canvas are three groups—the somberly clad women at the back right; a semicircle of similarly clad men, including town officials and a hunting dog, by the open grave; and assorted church- men at the left. The seemingly equal stature of all at the funeral also offended the hierarchical social sensibility of the Salon audience. This wall of figures blocks any view into deep space. The faces are portraits. 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. Despite the unposed look of the figures, Courbet controlled the composition in a masterful way by his sparing use of bright color. In place of the heroic, the sublime, and the dramatic (the mourn- ers are all emotionally detached), Courbet aggressively presented Salon viewers with the mundane realities of daily life and death. In 1857, Jules-François-Félix Husson Champfleury (1821-1889), one of the first critics to recognize and appreciate Courbet's work, wrote of Burial at Ornans, "[I]t represents a small-town funeral and yet reproduces the funerals of all small towns."5 Unlike the theatri- cality of Romanticism, Realism captured the ordinary rhythms of daily life.

MICHELANGELO, Pieta(unfinished), c.1547-55 [High Renaissance]17-20

Michelangelo made his first trip to Rome in the summer of 1496, and two years later, still in his early 20s, he produced his first masterpiece there: a Pietà (fig. 17-12) for Jean de Bilhères Lagraulas (1439-1499), Car- dinal of Saint-Denis and the French king's envoy to the Vatican. The cardinal commis- sioned the statue to be placed in the rotunda attached to the south transept of Old Saint Peter's (not shown in fig. 8-9) in which he was to be buried beside other French churchmen. (The work is now on view in the new church [fig. 19-4] that replaced the fourth-century basilica.) The theme—Mary cradling the dead body of Christ in her lap—was a staple in the repertoire of French and German artists, and Michelangelo's French patron doubtless chose the subject. The Italian sculptor, however, rendered the northern European theme in an unforgettable manner. Michelangelo trans- formed marble into flesh, hair, and fabric with a sensitivity for texture almost without parallel. The best photographs can capture something of the luminosity of the marble surface, but the exquisite nature of Michelangelo's carving and polishing can be fully appreciated only in the presence of the original. Also breathtaking is the tender sadness of the beautiful and youth- ful Mary as she mourns the death of her son. In fact, her age—seemingly less than that of Christ—was a subject of controversy from the moment the statue was unveiled. Michelangelo explained Mary's ageless beauty as an integral part of her purity and virginity. Beautiful, too, is the son whom she holds. (In fact, Michelangelo's figure of the adult Christ is too small in relation to the size of Mary. This may be an intentional allusion to the imagery of the Madonna and Child subject of innumerable artworks.) Christ seems less to have died a martyr's crucifixion than to have drifted off into peaceful sleep in Mary's maternal arms. His wounds are barely visible. It is hard to imagine a starker contrast in conception and style than that between the Röttgen Pietà (fig. 13-50) and Michelangelo's.

FRANCISCO GOYA, The Third of May, 1808,1814 [Romanticism]22-12

Much of Goya's multifaceted work deals not with Romantic fantasies but with contemporary events. In 1786, he became an official art- ist in the court of Charles IV (r. 1788-1808) and produced por- traits of the king and his family (fig. 22-11A). Dissatisfaction with the king's rule increased dramati- cally during Goya's tenure at the court, and the Spanish people eventually threw their support behind the king's son, Ferdinand VII, in the hope that he would initiate reform. To overthrow his father and mother, Queen Maria Luisa (1751-1819), Ferdinand enlisted the aid of Napoleon Bonaparte. Because he had designs on the Span- ish throne, Napoleon readily agreed to send French troops to Spain. Not surprisingly, as soon as he ousted Charles IV, Napoleon installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte (r. 1808-1813) on the Spanish throne as his surrogate. The Spanish people, finally recognizing the French as invad- ers, 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 (fig. 22-12), commissioned in 1814 by Ferdinand VII (r. 1813-1833), who had reclaimed the throne after the ouster of the French. In emotional fashion, following the lead of Callot (fig. 20-35) in the 18th century, Goya depicted the anonymous mur- derous wall of Napoleonic 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.) Goya 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

HANNAH HÖCH, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Culture Epoch of Germany, 1919-20 [Dada]24-28

One of the Berlin Dadaists who perfected the photomontage technique was Hannah Höch (1889-1978). Höch's photomontages advanced the absurd illogic of Dada by presenting the viewer with chaotic, contradictory, and satiric compositions. They also provided scathing and insightful com- mentary on two of the most dramatic developments during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) in Germany— the redefinition of women's social roles and the explosive growth of mass print media. Höch, a passionate early feminist, revealed these com- bined themes in Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (fig. 24-28). In this work, whose title refers to the story that the name "Dada" resulted from thrusting a knife into a dictionary (see page 781), Höch arranged an eclectic mixture of cutout photos in seemingly haphazard fashion. Closer inspection, however, reveals the artist's careful selection and placement of the photographs. For example, the key figures in the Weimar Republic are together at the upper right (identified as the "anti-Dada movement"). Some of Höch's fellow Dadaists appear among images of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, aligning Dada with other revolutionary forces in what she promi- nently labeled with cutout lettering Die grosse Welt dada ("the great Dada world"). Certainly, juxtaposing the heads of German military leaders with exotic dancers' bodies pro- vided the wickedly humorous critique central to much of Dada. Höch also positioned herself in the topsy-turvy Dada world that she created. A photograph of her head appears in the lower right corner, juxtaposed with a map of Europe showing which countries had granted women the right to vote—a commentary on the power that both women and Dada had to destabilize society.

ÉDOUART MANET, Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882 [Impressionism]23-1

One of the most popular Impressionist subjects was Paris's vibrant nightlife. The immensely versa- tile Édouard Manet (figs. 22-32 and 22-33), whose career bridged Realism and Impressionism, painted his last great work—A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (fig. 23-1)—under the influence of the younger Impres- sionists. The Folies-Bergère was a popular café with music-hall performances, one of Paris's most fash- ionable gathering places. At the center of Manet's Folies-Bergère is a barmaid, who looks out from the canvas but seems disinterested or lost in thought, divorced from her patrons as well as from the viewer. 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. What seems at first to be a straightforward representation of the bar, barmaid, and customers quickly fades as visual discrepancies immediately emerge. For example, is the reflection of the woman on the right the barmaid's? If both figures are the same person, it is impossible to reconcile the spa- tial relationship among the gentleman, the bar, the barmaid, and her seemingly displaced reflection. These visual contradictions complement Manet's blurred brushstrokes and rough application of paint. Together, they draw attention to the tactile surface of the canvas, consistent with late-19th-century art- ists' emerging insistence on underscoring the artifice of the act of painting, one of the central principles of modernist art.

MARCEL DUCHAMP, Fountain, 1917 [Dada]24-26

Perhaps the most influential Dadaist was Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), a Frenchman who became the cen- tral artist of New York Dada but was also active in Paris. In 1913, he exhibited his first "readymade" sculptures, which were mass- produced common objects—"found objects" that the artist selected and sometimes "rectified" by modifying their substance or combin- ing them with another object. 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. 24-26), 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. As with Duchamp's other readymades and "assisted ready- mades" such as L.H.O.O.Q. (fig. 24-26A), he did not select the urinal for exhibition because of its aesthetic qualities. 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 tosee the object in a new light. As Duchamp wrote in a "defense" pub- lished in 1917, after an exhibition committee rejected Fountain for display: "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object."17 It is hard to imagine a more direct challenge to artistic conventions than Dada works such as Fountain.

TIMOTHY O'SULLIVAN, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, PA, 1863 [Realism]22-52

Slowly, over the misty fields of Gettysburg--as all reluctant to expose their ghastly horrors to the light--came the sunless morn, after the retreat by [General Robert. E.] Lee's broken army. Through the shadowy vapors, it was, indeed, a "harvest of death" that was presented; hundreds and thousands of torn Union and rebel soldiers--although many of the former were already interred--strewed the now quiet fighting ground, soaked by the rain, which for two days had drenched the country with its fitful showers. This paragraph opens the text that Alexander Gardner wrote to accompany this photograph in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. Both text and image eloquently capture the war's toll of death and destruction, especially apparent after the Battle of Gettysburg, which took place from July 1 to July 3, 1863. Although Gardner's caption identifies the men in the photograph as "rebels represented...without shoes," they are probably Union dead. During the Civil War, shoes were routinely removed from corpses because supplies were scarce and surviving troops needed them.

REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, Self-Portrait, c.1660 [Northern Baroque]20-15

Rembrandt carried over the spiritual quality of his religious works into his later portraits (figs. 20-15 and 20-15A) by the same means—what could be called the "psychology of light." Light and dark are not in conflict in his portraits. They are reconciled, merging softly and subtly to produce the visual equivalent of quietness. Their prevailing mood is one of tranquil meditation, of philosophical resignation, of musing recollection—indeed, a whole clus- ter of emotional tones heard only in silence. In his self-portrait now in Kenwood House (fig. 20-15), the light source outside the upper left of the painting bathes the painter's face in soft highlights, leaving the lower part of his body in shadow. The artist depicted himself as possessing dignity and strength, and the portrait serves as a summary of the many sty- listic and professional concerns that occupied him throughout his career. Rembrandt's distinctive use of light is evident, as is the asser- tive brushwork suggesting his confidence and self-assurance. He presented himself as a working artist holding his brushes, palette, and maulstick (compare fig. 18-16) and wearing his studio garb— a smock and painter's turban. The circles on the wall behind him (the subject of much scholarly debate) may allude to a legendary sign of artistic virtuosity—the ability to draw a perfect circle freehand. Rembrandt's abiding interest in revealing the human soul emerges here in his careful focus on his expressive visage. His controlled use of light and the nonspecific setting contribute to this focus. X-rays of the painting have revealed that Rembrandt originally depicted himself in the act of painting. His final resolution, with the viewer's attention drawn to his face, produced a portrait not just of the artist but of the man as well.

AUGUSTE RODIN, Gates of Hell, 1880-1900 [Post-Impressionism]23-34

Rodin also made many nude and draped studies for each of the figures in two of his most ambitious works—the life-size group Burghers of Calais (fig. 23-33A) and the Gates of Hell (fig. 23-34), which occupied the sculptor for two decades. After he failed to gain admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, Rodin enrolled in the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et Mathé- matiques (Special Imperial School of Drawing and Mathematics), the French school of decorative arts, known as the "Petit École" (Little School) because it was a lesser version of the more presti- gious Beaux-Arts academy. However, Rodin's talent could not be suppressed by rejection. He soon gained attention for the outstanding realism of some of his early sculptures, and on August 16, 1880, received a major governmental commission to design a pair of doors for a planned Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. Rodin worked on the project for 20 years, but the museum was never built (the Musée d'Orsay now occupies the intended site). It was not until after the sculptor's death that others cast his still-unfinished doors in bronze. The commission granted Rodin permission to choose his own subject. He selected The Gates of Hell, based on Dante's Inferno and Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil. Originally inspired by Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (fig. 16-10), which he had seen in Florence, Rodin quickly abandoned the idea of a series of framed narrative panels and decided instead to cover each of the doors with a continuous writhing mass of tormented men and women, sinners condemned to Dante's second circle of Hell for their lust. Because of the varying height of the relief, the complex poses, and the effect of light on the highly textured surfaces, the figures seem to be in flux, moving in and out of an undefined space in a reflection of their psychic turmoil. The dreamlike (or rather, the nightmarish) vision con- nects Rodin with the Symbolists, and the pessimistic mood and sensuality embody the fin-de-siècle spirit. The swirling composition and emotionalism recall Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (fig. 22-15) and Michelangelo's Last Judgment (fig. 17-19). Rodin's work defies easy stylistic classification. The nearly 200 figures of The Gates of Hell spill over onto the jambs and the lintel. Rodin also included freestanding figures, which, cast separately in multiple versions, are among his most famous works. Above the doors, The Three Shades is a trio of twisted nude male figures, essentially the same figure with elongated arms in three different positions. The The Gates of Hell, more than 20 feet tall, was Rodin's most ambi- tious project. It greatly influenced the painters and sculptors of the Expressionist movements of the early 20th century (see page 765). Rodin's ability to capture the quality of the transitory through his highly textured surfaces while revealing larger themes and deeper, lasting sensibilities is another reason he had a strong influence on 20th-century artists. Because many of his works, such as Walking Man, were deliberate fragments, he was also instrumental in cre- ating a taste for the incomplete, an aesthetic many later sculptors embraced enthusiastically.

MARK ROTHKO, No. 14, 1960 [Abstract Expressionism]25-11

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. 25-11), Rothko created compelling visual experiences by confining his compositions to two or three large rect- angles of pure color with hazy edges. The forms seem to float on the canvas surface, hovering in front of a colored background. Rothko often displayed his paintings in rows so that the several canvases together presented shimmering veils of intensely luminous colors. Although the color juxtapositions are visually captivating, Rothko intended them as more than decorative. He saw color as a doorway to another reality, and insisted that color could express "basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom. . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point."7 Like the other Abstract Expressionists, Rothko produced highly evocative paintings reliant on formal elements rather than on specific representational content to elicit emotional responses in the viewer.

ALBRECHT DÜRER, Melancholia I, 1514 [Northern Renaissance]18-1

The Roman numeral on the bat's banner refers to the first level of melancholy: artistic melancholy. However, the burst of light suggests that artists can overcome depression and produce great art. In this "self-portrait" of his artistic person- ality, Dürer represented Melancholy as a brooding winged woman. Melancholy's face is obscured by shadow, underscoring her state of mind. All around Dürer's seated personification of Melancholy are the tools of the artist and builder—compass, hammer, saw, and nails among them— but the melancholic artist is incapable of using them. One of Dürer's most famous works, Melencolia I (fig. 18-1), reveals not only his unsurpassed skill with the engraver's burin but also a great deal about his psyche as a Renaissance artist. In Melencolia I, Dürer took up the theme of melancholy, one of the temperaments associated with the "four humors"— the fluids that were the basis of the theories about body functions developed by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and practiced in medieval physiology. The Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) had written an influential treatise (De vita triplici, 1482-1489) in which he asserted that artists were distinct from the population at large because they were born under the sign of the planet Saturn, named for the ancient Roman god. They shared that deity's melancholic temperament because they had an excess of black bile (one of the four humors) in their systems. Artists therefore were "satur- nine"—eccentric and capable both of inspired artistic frenzy and melancholic depression. Raphael had depicted Michelangelo in the guise of the brooding Heraclitus in his School of Athens (fig. 17-9), and Dürer used a similarly posed female figure for his winged personification of Melancholy.

JACKSON POLLOCK, Number I, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950 [Abstract Expressionism]25-6

The artist whose work best exemplifies ges- tural abstraction is Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), who developed his signature style in the mid-1940s. By 1950, Pollock had refined his technique and was producing large-scale abstract paintings such as Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist; fig. 25-6), which consist of rhyth- mic 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 sim- ply unrolled across his studio floor (see "Jackson Pollock on Easel and Mural Painting," above, and fig. 25-7). This working method earned Pollock the derisive nickname "Jack the Dripper." Respond- ing to the image as it developed, he created art that was spontaneous yet choreographed. Pollock's painting technique highlights the most significant aspect of gestural abstraction—its emphasis on the cre- ative process. Indeed, Pollock literally immersed himself in the painting during its creation.

HENRI MATISSE, Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-6 [Fauvism]24-2A

The dominant figure of the Fauve group was Henri Matisse (1869-1954), who believed that color could play a primary role in conveying meaning, and consequently focused his efforts on developing this notion. In an early painting, Woman with the Hat (fig. 24-2), Matisse depicted his wife, Amélie, in a rather conventional manner compositionally, but the seemingly arbitrary colors immediately startle the viewer, as does the sketchi- ness of the forms. The entire image—the woman's face, clothes, hat, and background—consists of patches and splotches of color juxta- posed in ways that sometimes produce jarring contrasts. Matisse explained his approach: "What characterized Fauvism was that we rejected imitative colors, and that with pure colors we obtained stronger reactions."1 For Matisse and the Fauves, therefore, color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary con- veyor of meaning

GIANLORENZO BERNINI, Piazza and Colonnade of St. Peter's, 1656-67 [Italian Baroque]19-4

The dramatic gesture of embrace that Bernini's colon- nade makes as worshipers enter Saint Peter's piazza symbolizes the welcome the Catholic Church wished to extend during the Counter- Reformation. old Saint Peter's had a large forecourt, or atrium (fig. 8-10, no. 6), in front of the church proper, and in the mid-17th century, Gianlorenzo Bernini, who had long before established his reputation as a supremely gifted architect and sculptor (see page 581), received the prestigious commission to construct a monumental colonnade-framed piazza (fig. 19-4) in front of Maderno's facade. Bernini's design had to incorporate two preexisting structures on the site—an obelisk that the ancient Romans had brought from Egypt (which Pope Sixtus V had moved to its present location in 1585 as part of his vision of Christian triumph in Rome) and a fountain that Maderno constructed in front of the church. Bernini's solution was to co-opt these features to define the long axis of a vast oval embraced by two colonnades joined to Maderno's facade. Four rows of huge Tuscan columns make up the two colonnades, which ter- minate in classical temple fronts. The colonnades extend a dramatic gesture of embrace to all who enter the piazza, symbolizing the wel- come that the Roman Catholic Church gave its members during the Counter-Reformation. Bernini himself referred to his colonnades as the welcoming arms of Saint Peter's. Beyond their symbolic resonance, the colonnades served visually to counteract the natural perspective and bring the facade closer to the viewer. Emphasizing the facade's height in this manner, Bernini subtly and effectively compensated for its extensive width. Thus a Baroque transformation expanded the compact central designs of Bramante and Michelangelo into a dynamic complex of axially ordered elements that reach out and enclose spaces of vast dimension. By its sheer scale and theatricality, the completed Saint Peter's fulfilled the desire of the Counter-Reformation Church to present an awe-inspiring and authori- tative vision of itself.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1943-59 [Modernism]25-40

The last great building that Frank Lloyd Wright designed was the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Using reinforced concrete almost as a sculptor might use resilient clay, Wright, who often described his architecture as "organic" (see "Frank Lloyd Wright on Organic Architecture," page 797), designed a structure inspired by the spiral of a snail's shell. Wright had introduced curves and circles into some of his plans in the 1930s, and as the architectural historian Peter Blake noted, "The spiral was the next logical step; it is the circle brought into the third and fourth dimensions."23 Inside the building (fig. 26-34), the shape of the shell expands toward the top, and a winding interior ramp spirals to connect the gallery bays. A skylight strip embedded in the museum's outer wall provides illumination to the ramp, which visitors can stroll down at a leisurely pace after taking an elevator to the top of the building, viewing the artworks displayed along the gently sloping pathway. Thick walls and the solid organic shape give the building, outside and inside, the sense of turning in on itself, and the long interior viewing area opening onto a 90-foot central well of space creates a sheltered environment, secure from the bustling city outside.

GRANT WOOD, American Gothic, 1930 [American Regionalism]24-72

The work that catapulted Wood to national prominence was American Gothic (fig. 24-72), which became an American icon. The artist depicted his dentist and his sister posing as a farmer and his spinster daughter standing in front of a neat house with a small lancet window, a motif originating in Gothic architecture and associated with churches and religious piety. The man and woman wear traditional attire. He appears in worn overalls and she in an apron trimmed with rickrack. The dour expression on both faces gives the painting a severe quality, which Wood enhanced with his meticulous brushwork. The public and professional critics agreed that American Gothic was "quaint, humorous, and AMERICAN" and embodied "strength, dignity, fortitude, resoluteness, integrity," qualities that represented the true spirit of America.45 Wood's Regionalist vision involved more than his subjects. It extended to a rejection of avant-garde styles in favor of a clearly readable, Realist style. Surely, this approach appealed to many people alienated by the increasing presence of abstraction in art. However, despite the accolades this painting received, it also attracted criti- cism. Not everyone saw the painting as a sympathetic portrayal of Midwestern life. Indeed, some Iowans considered the depiction of life in their state insulting. In addition, despite the seemingly reportorial nature of American Gothic, some viewed it as a political statement—one of staunch nationalism. In light of the problematic nationalism in Germany at the time, many observers found Wood's nationalistic attitude disturbing. Nonetheless, during the Great Depression, Regionalist paintings had a popular appeal because they often projected a reassuring image of America's heartland. The public saw Regionalism as a means of coping with the national crisis through a search for cultural roots. Thus people deemed acceptable any nostalgia implicit in Regionalist paintings or the mythologies these works perpetuated, because they served a larger purpose.

RICHARD HAMILTON, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956 [Pop]25-23

Thus was born the art movement that came to be known as Pop. Art historians trace the roots of Pop Art to the young British artists, architects, and writers who formed the Independent Group at the Institute of Con- temporary Art in London in 1952. They sought to initiate fresh thinking in art, in part by sharing their fascination with the aesthetics and content of such facets of popular culture as advertising, comic books, and movies (see "Pop Art and Consumer Culture," page 846). In 1956, an Independent Group member, Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), made small collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (fig. 25-23), which exemplifies British Pop Art. Trained as an engineering draftsman, exhibition designer, and painter, Ham- ilton studied the way that advertising shapes public attitudes. Long intrigued by Marcel Duchamp's ideas (see page 782), Hamilton con- sistently combined elements of popular art and fine art, seeing both as belonging to the whole world of visual communication. He created Just What Is It? for the poster and catalog of one section of an exhibi- tion titled This Is Tomorrow, which included images from Hollywood cinema, science fiction, and the mass media.

VINCENT VAN GOGH, The Night Café, 1888 [Post-Impressionism]23-18

Van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, where he began to collect—and copy (fig. 23-17B)—Japa- nese prints. In 1881, he relocated to Arles in southern France, where he painted Night Café (fig. 23-18), one of his most important and innova- tive canvases. Although the subject is apparently benign, van Gogh invested it with a charged energy. As he stated in a letter to his brother Theo (see "The Letters of Vincent van Gogh," page 736), he wanted the painting to convey an oppressive atmosphere—"a place where one can ruin 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."6 The room is seen from above, and the floor takes up a large portion of the canvas, as in the paintings of Degas (fig. 23-9). The ghostlike proprietor stands at the edge of the café's billiard table, disengaged from his customers, as they are from each other. Van Gogh depicted the bil- liard table in such a steeply tilted perspective that it threatens to slide out of the painting into the viewer's space. He communicated the "madness" of the place by selecting vivid hues whose juxtaposi- tion augmented their intensity. Van Gogh's insistence on the expressive values of color led him to develop a corresponding expressiveness in his paint application. The thickness, shape, and direction of his brushstrokes created a tactile counterpart to his intense color schemes. He moved the brush vehe- mently 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.

ROBERT VENTURI, Vanna Venturi house, Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, 1962 [Post-Modernism]25-47

When designing these varied buildings, many postmodern archi- tects consciously selected past architectural elements or references and juxtaposed them with contemporary elements or fashioned them of high-tech materials, thereby creating a dialogue between past and present, as Charles Moore did in Piazza d'Italia (fig. 25-1). Postmodern architecture incorporates references not only to traditional architec- ture but also to mass culture and popular imagery. this was precisely the "complexity and contradiction" Venturi referred to in the title of his book and that he explored further in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), coauthored with denise scott Brown (b. 1931) and steven Izenour (1940-2001). An early example of Venturi's work is the house (fig. 25-47) he designed in 1962 for his mother. A fundamental axiom of modernism is that a building's form must arise directly and logically from its function and structure. Against this rule, Venturi asserted that form should be separate from function and structure. thus the Vanna Venturi house has an oversized gable roof that recalls classical temple design more than domestic architecture. However, the gable has a missing central section, which reveals the house's "chimney" (a penthouse suite). Moreover, Venturi inserted an arch motif over the doorway's lintel, and the placement of the windows violates the symmetry of both classical and modernist design.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, Robie House, Chicago, 1907-09[Modernism]23-46

Wright's vigorous originality emerged early, and by 1900 he had arrived at a style entirely his own. In his work during the first decade of the 20th century, his cross-axial plan and his fabric of continuous roof planes and screens defined a new American domestic architec- ture. He fully expressed these elements and concepts in the Robie House (fig. 24-45), built between 1907 and 1909. Like other build- ings in the Chicago area that Wright designed at about the same time, he called this home a "prairie house." Wright conceived the long, sweeping, ground-hugging lines, unconfined by abrupt wall limits, as reaching out toward and capturing the expansiveness of the Midwest's great flatlands. Abandoning all symmetry, he elimi- nated a facade, extended the roofs far beyond the walls, and all but concealed the entrance. Wright filled the house's "wandering" plan (fig. 24-46) with intricately joined spaces (some large and open, others closed), grouped freely around a great central fireplace. (He believed strongly in the hearth's age-old domestic significance as well as in its ability to keep a house's inhabitants warm in Chicago's frigid winters.) Wright designed enclosed patios, overhanging roofs (essential to provide shade in the summer heat), and strip windows to provide unexpected light sources and glimpses of the outdoors as the inhabitants moved through the interior space. These elements, together with the open ground plan, created a sense of space in motion, inside and out. Wright matched his new and fundamental interior spatial arrangement in his exterior treatment. For example, the flow of interior space determined the sharp angular placement of exterior walls.

PAUL CÉZANNE, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904-6 [Post-Impressionism]23-22

cézanne's distinctive way of studying nature is evident in Mont Sainte-Victoire (fig. 23-22), one of many views that he painted of this mountain near his home in Aix-en-Provence. His aim was not truth in appearance, especially not photographic truth, nor was it the "truth" of Impressionism. rather, he sought a lasting struc- ture behind the formless and fleeting visual information that the eyes absorb. Instead of employing the Impressionists' random approach when he was face-to-face with nature, cézanne, like Seurat, developed a more analytical style. His goal was to order the lines, planes, and colors of nature. He constantly and painstakingly checked his painting against the part of the scene—he called it the "motif"—that he was studying at the moment. For example, in Mont Sainte-Victoire, cézanne replaced the tran- sitory visual effects of changing atmospheric conditions, effects that preoccupied Monet, with a more concentrated, lengthier analysis of the colors in large lighted spaces. The main space stretches out behind and beyond the canvas plane and includes numerous small elements, such as roads, fields, houses, and the viaduct at the far right, each seen from a slightly different viewpoint. Above this shifting, receding perspective—so different from traditional renaissance perspective with the viewer standing in a fixed position and with a single vanish- ing point (see "linear Perspective," page 467)—the largest mass of all, the mountain, seems simultaneously to be both near and far away, an effect achieved by equally stressing background and foreground contours. cézanne's rendition of nature approximates the experience that a person has when viewing the forms of nature piecemeal. The relative proportions of objects vary, rather than being fixed by strict linear perspective. cézanne immobilized the shifting colors of Impres- sionism into an array of clearly defined planes composing the objects and spaces in his scene.

ANDY WARHOL, Marilyn Diptych, 1962 [Pop]25-27A

he quintessential American Pop artist was Andy Warhol (1928-1987). An early successful career as a commercial artist and illustrator grounded Warhol in the sensibility and visual rhetoric of advertising and the mass media. This knowledge proved useful for his Pop artworks, which often depicted icons of mass- produced consumer culture, such as Green Coca-Cola Bot- tles (fig. 25-27), and Holly- wood celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962; fig. 25-27A). Warhol favored reassuringly familiar objects and people. He explained his attraction to the ubiquitous curved Coke bottle: 25-27A Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. 1 ft. What's great about this country is that America started the tradi- tion where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke.15 As did other Pop artists, Warhol used a visual vocabulary and a printing method that reinforced the image's connections to consumer culture. The silk-screen technique enabled War- hol 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, including gas stations, as immortal- ized by George Segal (1924-2000) in 1963 (fig. 25-27B). 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."

LEONARDO DA VINCI, Mona Lisa, c.1503-5 [High Renaissance]17-5

identified the woman por- trayed as Lisa di Antonio Maria Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a wealthy Florentine—hence, "Mona (an Italian con- traction of ma donna, "my lady") Lisa." Unlike earlier portraits, Leonardo's representation of Gherardini, who was about 25 years old when she posed for Leonardo, does not serve solely as an icon of status. Indeed, Gherardini wears no jewelry and holds no attri- bute associated with wealth. Leonardo's concern was rather to paint a convincing representation of a specific individual, both in terms of appearance and personality. Mona Lisa sits quietly, her hands folded, her mouth forming a gentle smile, and her gaze directed at the viewer. Renaissance etiquette dictated that a woman should not look directly into a man's eyes. Leonardo's portrayal of this self- assured young woman without the trappings of power but engaging the audience psychologically is unprecedented and accounts in large part for the painting's unparalleled reputation today. The enduring appeal of Mona Lisa also derives from Leonardo's decision to set his subject against the backdrop of a mysterious unin- habited landscape. This setting, with roads and bridges seemingly leading nowhere, recalls that of his Madonna of the Rocks (fig. 17-2). The composition also resembles Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child with Angels (fig. 16-24) with figures seated in front of a window through which the viewer glimpses a distant landscape. Originally, the artist represented Gherardini in a loggia. A later owner trimmed the painting, eliminating the columns, but partial column bases remain to the left and right of Mona Lisa's shoulders. Mona Lisa still reveals Leonardo's fascination and skill with chiaroscuro and atmospheric perspective. The portrait is a prime example of the artist's famous smoky sfumato (misty hazi- ness)—his subtle adjustment of light and blurring of precise planes.

EDMONIA LEWIS, Forever Free, 1867 [Neoclassicism]22-39

lewis produced sculptures stylistically indebted to Neoclassicism but depicting contemporary Realist themes. Forever Free (fig. 22-39) is a marble statue that she carved while living in Rome, surrounded by examples of both classical and Renaissance art. It represents two freed African American slaves immediately after President lincoln's issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. The man stands trium- phantly in a contrapposto stance reminiscent of classical statues. His right hand rests on the shoulder of the kneeling woman with her hands clasped in thankful prayer. The man holds aloft in his left hand a bro- ken manacle and chain as literal and symbolic references to his former servitude. Produced four years after lincoln's proclamation, Forever Free (originally titled The Morning of Liberty) was widely perceived as an abolitionist statement. ("Forever free" is a phrase that lincoln used in both his preliminary september 1862 and final January 1863 eman- cipation proclamations.) Although emancipated, the former slaves still have shackles attached, in contrast to those born free. However, other factors caution against an overly simplistic reading. For example, schol- ars have debated the degree to which the sculptor attempted to inject a statement about gender relationships into this statue and whether the kneeling position of the woman is a reference to female subordination in the African American community. lewis's accomplishments as a sculptor speak to the increasing access to training available to women in the 19th century. she adopted the name Edmonia lewis in 1859 when she was admitted to oberlin col- lege (the first American college to grant degrees to women and among the first to admit African Americans). After oberlin, lewis became an 22-39 Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867. Marble, 3' 5 14" high. James A. Porter Gallery of Afro-American Art, Howard University, Washington, D.C. African American- chippewa lewis's sculptures owe a stylistic debt to Neo- classicism but depict contemporary Realist themes. she carved Forever Free four years after lincoln's Eman- cipation Proclamation. 1 ft. apprentice in a sculpture studio in Boston. she financed her 1865 trip to Rome, which became her permanent home, with the sale of portrait medallions and marble busts, mostly representing abolitionist leaders. lewis's success in a field dominated by white European and American men is a testament to both her artistic skill and her determination.

THÉODORE GERICAULT, Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19 [Romanticism]22-1

n Raft of the Medusa, Géricault chose to represent the moment when some of those still alive sum- mon what little strength they have left to flag down the Argus far on the horizon, not knowing if the ship's crew could see their raft. Géricault sought to capture accurately the horror, chaos, and emotion of the tragedy yet invoke the grandeur and impact of Neoclassical history painting. He visited hospi- tals and morgues to study the bodies of the dying and dead, interviewed survivors, and had a model of the raft constructed in his studio. The legacy of Neoclassicism is still evident in the incongruously muscular bodies of the starving. But Géricault rejected Neoclassical composition principles and instead presented a jumble of writhing bodies. He arranged the survivors and several corpses in a powerful X-shaped composition, and piled one body on another in every attitude of suffering, despair, and death. One light-filled diagonal axis stretches from the bodies at the lower left up to the black man raised on his comrades' shoulders and waving a tattered garment toward the horizon. Yet the man, seen from the back and faceless, is an anonymous antihero, in striking contrast to the protagonists of the historical and mythological works then in vogue. The cross axis descends from the dark, billowing sail at the up- per left to the shadowed upper torso of the body trailing in the open sea. Géricault's bold decision to place the raft at a diagonal so that a corner juts outward makes it seem as though some of the corpses are sliding off the raft into the viewer's space. Raft of the Medusa, like the event itself, caused a sensation. It established Géricault's reputation and reoriented the history of painting.

GEORGES SEURAT, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-6 [Post-Impressionism]23-17

pointillism—involved dividing colors into their component parts and applying those colors to the canvas in tiny dots. The forms become compre- hensible only from a distance. the viewer perceives a grayish or neutral tint. Seurat used this principle frequently in his paintings. Also influential for Seurat was the work of physicist ogden rood (1831-1902), who published his ideas in Modern Chromatics, with Appli- cations to Art and Industry in 1879. Expanding on the ideas of chevreul and Blanc, rood constructed an accurate and understandable diagram of contrasting colors. Further (and particularly significant to Seurat), rood explored representing color gradation. He suggested that art- ists could achieve gradation by placing small dots or lines of color side by side, which he observed blended in the eye of the beholder when viewed from a distance. The color experiments of Seurat and other late-19th-century art- ists were also part of a larger discourse about human vision and how people see and understand the world. The theories of physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916) focused on the psychological experience of sensa- tion. He believed that humans perceive their environments in isolated units of sensation that the brain then recomposes into a comprehensi- ble world. Another scientist, charles Henry (1859-1926), also pursued research into the psychological dimension of color—how colors affect people, and under what conditions. He went even further to explore the physiological effects of perception. Seurat's work, though characterized by a systematic and scientifi- cally minded approach, also incorporated his concerns about the emotional tone of the images.