Art History 101

Museum

A museum in its simplest form consists of a building to house collection of objects for inspection, study and enjoyment.

The American Association of Museums

An organized and permanent non-profit institution, essentially educational or aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff, which owns and utilizes tangible objects, cares for them, and exhibits them to the public on some regular schedule.

Angkor Wats SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

Built in the early 12th century under the patronage of the god-king Suryavarman II and dedicated to Vishnu, Angkor Wat consists of five shrines of a raised, pyramidal stone "mountains". Each shrine houses a garbhagriha the womblike dwelling place of the deity. Colonnaded galleries connect and enclose the five shrines, their wall carved with reliefs depicting dancing figures, celestial beings, and the many guises and adventures of Vishnu. Visitors approach the complex by a long walkway the originally crossed over a surrounding moat. Like Hindu temples in India, the plan of Angkor Wat is based in mandala, a diagram of a cosmic realm, and thus the entire site reflects the meaning and order of the spiritual universe.

Punctum

Emotional juice, focal point, the long last impression

Indexical

How closely it represents real life

Islamic Calligraphy

Islamic scholars commonly memorize-- is viewed as an act of prayer. Calligraphy thus became the most highly regarded art in Islamic lands, and great calligraphers achieved the renown Europeans accorded to painters and sculptors. As a religious text, the Qur'an was never illustrated with images of animate beings. Instead, artists ornamented manuscripts with geometric patterns and stylized plant forms, just as they did mosques. An example is this page from a Qur'an copied in 1307 by a famous calligrapher named Ahmad al-Suhrawardi. The top and bottom bands of the painted frame are ornamented in gold with interlacing plant forms and a line of text in an archaic style of Arabic script called Kufic. Ahmad's own bold and graceful calligraphy fills the framed area.

Qin terracotta army CHINA

Life-size figures stand in their thousands- soldiers, archers, cavalryman, and charioteers--facing east, the direction from which danger was expected to come. Time has bleached them to a ghostly gray, but when they were new, they were painted in lifelike colors fir only by being as realistic as possible could they effectively protect the emperor's tomb behind them, about half a mile to the west.

Colossal Heads AMERICAS

The huge basalt blocks for the large sculptures were quarried at distant sites and transported to San Lorenzo, La Venta, and other centers. The colossal heads range in height from 5 to 12 feet and weigh from 5 to more than 20 tons. They portray adult males wearing close-fitting caps with chin straps and large, round ear spools (cylindrical earrings that pierce the earlobe). The fleshy faces have almond-shaped eyes, flat, broad noses, thick protruding lips, and downturned mouths. Each face is different, suggesting that they may represent specific individuals. Ten colossal heads were found at San Lorenzo.

Haniwa JAPAN

The simple cylindrical shapes of the haniwa horse are echoed here in the wooden piles that raise the structure off the ground and the horizontal logs that hold the precisely trimmed thatch roof I place. The shrine is left unpainted, just as haniwa left unglazed. It has simple forms and natural materials that is one of the themes of Japanese.

Nok Sculpture

The smooth surfaces and D-shaped eyes are characteristic of works from the culture known as Nok, named after the town in Nigeria where the first examples if its art were found. Scientific testing suggests that most Nok works were made between 500 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., or around the time of ancient Greece and Rome. Broken off at the neck, the life size head here probably formed part of a complete figure. Judging by the few complete figures that have been recovered, its elaborate, sculpture hairstyle would have been complemented by lavish quantities of jewelry and other ornaments.

Relief printing

a process where protruding surface faces of the printing plate or block are inked; recessed areas are ink free. Printing the image is therefore a relatively simple matter of inking the face of the matrix and bringing it in firm contact with the paper.

installation

is an artwork created by the assembling and arrangement of objects in a specific location.

Intaglio

is the family of printing and printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface, and the incised line or sunken area holds the ink. It is the direct opposite of a relief print

additive

processes, the sculptor builds the work, adding material as the work proceeds.

subtractive

processes,the sculptor begins with a mass of material larger than the finished work and removes material, or subtracts from that mass until the work achieves its finished form. Example:carving

Woodcut

relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts.

Silkscreen

technique in which a mesh cloth is stretched over a heavy wooden frame and the design, painted on the screen by tusche or affixed by stencil, is printed by having a squeegee force color through the pores of the material in areas not blocked out by a glue sizing. 2.

casting

the sculptor pours molten material into a mold and allows it to harden. Casting has additive aspects, but is really a process that defies categorization as either additive or subtractive.