ARTH 3456 REVIEW TEST 1
Kollwitz, Lamentation, 1938
-Kollwitz was capable of an equally intense expression in sculpture, with which she was increasingly involved throughout her last years. -But perhaps the most significant influence on her work in three dimensions was that of her friend Ernst Barlach. The highly emotional tenor of her work, whether made for a humanitarian cause or in memory of her dead son, arose from a profoundly felt grief that trans-mitted itself to her sculpture and prints. -is an example of Kollwitz's relief sculpture, a moving, close-up portrait of her own grieving.
Balla, Street Light, 1909
AN example of pure Futurism in the handling of a modern, urban subject. Using V-shaped brushstrokes of complementary colors radiating from the central source of the lamp, he created an optical illusion of light rays translated into dazzling colors so intense that they appear to vibrate. Balla, working in Rome rather than Milan, pursued his own distinctive experiments, particularly in rendering motion through simultaneous views of many aspects of objects.
Reitveld Schroder House, 1924
Rietveld used detached interlocking planes of rectangular slabs, joined by unadorned piping, to break up the structure, giving the whole the appearance of a Constructivist sculpture. The large cor-ner and row windows give ample interior light; cantilevered roofs shelter the interior from the sun; and, according to Mrs. Schröder's requirements, sliding partitions created open-plan spaces for maximum flexibility of movement.
Tanning Maternity, 1946
-A forlorn woman stands in a desert holding her fretful baby. An open door doesn't seem to lead to opportunity, but rather, an object we can't make sense of. A filial dog with a baby's face lies on a white blanket at the woman's feet. We notice that her white dress is shredded from the belly downwards. -Tanning never had kids, and she was terrified of the thought. Instead, she kept a Pomeranian throughout her life Women artists had to make a choice back then: spend their time raising a family or spend their time in the studio. Indeed, this is still something we struggle with.
Dix, Corpse in the Barbed Wire, 1924
-Appearing ten years after the conflict began, Otto Dix's monumental portfolio Der Krieg (The war) neither glorifies World War I nor heroizes its soldiers but shows, in fifty unrelentingly graphic images, the horrible realities experienced by someone who was there. Dix, an artillery gunner in the trenches at the Somme and on the Eastern Front, focused on the aftermath of battle: dead, dying, and shell-shocked soldiers, bombed-out landscapes, and graves. -Dix manipulated the etching and aquatint mediums to heighten the emotional and realistic effects of his meticulously rendered images of horror. He stopped out ghastly white bones and strips of no man's land, leaving brilliant white patches; multiple acid baths ate away at the images, mimicking decaying flesh.
Beckman, Departure, 1932-3
-Beckmann made nine paintings in the triptych format, obviously making a connection between his work and the great ecclesiastical art of the past: church altarpieces typically comprised two or more panels, which, when taken together, address a particular Christian theme or recount episodes from the life of Jesus or one of the saints. The right-wing of Departure shows frustration, indecision, and self-torture; in the left-wing, sadistic mutilation, and the torture of others. - -On the right-wing you can see yourself trying to find your way in the darkness, lighting the hall and stair-case with a miserable lamp dragging along tied to you as part of yourself, the corpse of your memories, of your wrongs, of your failures, the murder everyone commits at some time of his life—you can never free yourself of your past, you have to carry the corpse while Life plays the drum. -In addition, despite his disavowal of political interests, the lefthand panel must refer to the rise of dictatorship that was driving liberal artists, writers, and thinkers underground. The darkness and suffering in the wings are resolved in the brilliant sunlight colors of the central panel, where the king, the mother, and the child set forth, guided by the veiled boatman. It is important to emphasize that Beckmann's allegories and symbols were not literal iconographies, to be read by anyone given the key. The spectator had to participate actively, and the allusions could mean something different to each.
Picasso, La Vie, 1903
-For the gaunt couple at the left Picasso depicted Casagemas and his lover as they receive a stern gaze from the woman holding a baby at the right (drawn from female prisoners). -Upon hearing the word of his friend's very public, very violent suicide, a grief-stricken Picasso was thrust into a depression, further exacerbated by profound feelings of guilt for having abandoned Casagemas during his darkest hours. -Picasso tackled his emotional turmoil and angst in the way he knew best - with tubes of paint. Blue paint. A melancholy, monochromatic palette. Moods of despair, sorrow, and isolation.
Gropius Bauhaus, 1925-6
-Here, Gropius was able to realize one of the clearest statements of functionalism. These buildings, finished in 1926, incorporated a complex of classrooms, studios, workshops, library, and living quarters for faculty and students. -The asymmetrical plan of the Bauhaus is roughly cruciform, with administrative offices concentrated in the broad, uninterrupted ferro-concrete span of the bridge linking workshops with classrooms and library. In every way, the architect sought the most efficient organization of interior space. At the same time, he was sensitive to the abstract organization of the rectangular exterior—the relation of windows to walls, concrete to glass, verticals to horizontals, lights to darks.
Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 1919-20
-Höch here presents a satirical panorama of Weimar society. She includes photographs of her Dada colleagues, Communist leaders, dancers, sports figures, and Dada slogans in varying typefaces. The despised Weimar government leaders at the upper right are labeled the "anti-Dada movement." -Throughout the composition are photographs of gears and wheels, both a tribute to technology and a means of imparting a sense of dynamic, circular movement. One difference between Höch and her colleagues is the preponderance of female imagery in her work, indicative of her interest in the new roles of women in postwar Germany, which had granted them the vote in 1918, two years before the United States.
Braque, Braque Houses at L'Estaque, 1908
-In Houses at L'Estaque painted in 1908, we can see the emergence of early Cubism. -Inspired by Cezanne's example, Braque has reduced nature's variety of color into its essential and simple browns and greens This picture is one of the most important landscape paintings in early cubism. -The artist combined architecture and nature in extreme reduction & abstraction. -Neglect the classical central perspective and leave a number of details out. The structure is radically simplified; building-block houses rise up a hill away from a rather tubular tree. -The picture depicts group of houses with several trees and hillside in L'Estaque. -The representational forms are secondary to the rhythm of the composition.
Picasso, Demoiselles D'Avignon, 1907
-In this painting, Picasso abandoned all known forms and representations of traditional art. He used distortion of the female's body and geometric forms in an innovative way, which challenge the expectation that paintings will offer idealized representations of female beauty. It also shows the influence of African art on Picasso. -This painting is a large work and took nine months to complete. -Long regarded as the first Cubist painting, the Demoiselles are now generally seen as a powerful example of expressionist art. The five demoiselles, or young ladies, represent prostitutes from Avignon Street, in Barcelona's notorious red-light district, which Picasso knew well.
Schwitters, Merz-Build, 1920
-The Merzbau grew throughout the 1920s with successive accretions of every kind of material until it filled the room. Having no place to go but up, he continued the environ-mental construction with implacable logic into the second story. -When he was driven from Germany by the Nazis and his original Merzbau was destroyed, Schwitters started another one in Norway. The Nazi invasion forced him to England, where he began again for the third time. After his death in 1948, the third Merzbau was rescued and preserved in the University of Newcastle.
1. Explain the pictorial treatment by the Fauvists and the Expressionists, in which ways they reject previous styles.
-The artist's direct experience of his subjects, his emotional response to nature, and his intuition were all more important than academic theory or elevated subject matter. All elements of painting were employed in service of this goal. The Fauves' simplified forms and saturated colors drew attention to the inherent flatness of the canvas or paper; within that pictorial space, each element played a specific role. The immediate visual impression of the work is to be strong and unified. -The arrival of Expressionism announced new standards in the creation and judgment of art. Art was now meant to come forth from within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for assessing the quality of a work of art became the character of the artist's feelings rather than an analysis of the composition. Expressionist artists often employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their subjects. These techniques were meant to convey the turgid emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world.
Picasso, Guernica, 1937
-The twentieth century was insanely violent, with incredible numbers of casualties/deaths between World War I and World War II, roughly 78 million. -The painting shows animals, humans, and even buildings going through the pain caused by war; after painting it, Picasso brought the painting on a world tour and it became one of the most famous anti-war symbols in history
Malevich White Square on White, 1918
-White on White was one of the most radical paintings of its day: a geometric abstraction without reference to external reality. Yet the picture is not impersonal: we see the artist's hand in the texture of the paint and in the subtle variations of the whites. The square is not exactly symmetrical, and its lines, imprecisely ruled, have a breathing quality, generating a feeling not of borders defining a shape but of a space without limits. -Malevich was fascinated with technology and particularly with the airplane. He studied aerial photography and wanted White on White to create a sense of floating and transcendence.
Magritte, Le Viol, 1934
-the instability of the image causes disorientation as it vacillates between a woman's limbless nude torso and an androgynous face. As the breasts of the figure morph into eyes and the pubic area resolves into a mouth, the work becomes a lesson in the uncanny: the unsettling loss of confidence in one's ability to discern one form from another. In the case of The Rape, this disorientation becomes threatening. The title announces sexual violence psychically if not literally committed against women.
Kandinsky Composition VII, 1913
An enormous can-vas from 1913, colors, shapes, and lines collide across the pictorial field in a furiously explosive assembly. Yet even in the midst of this symphonic arrangement of abstract forms, the characteristic motifs Kandinsky had distilled over the years can still be deciphered, such as the glyph of a boat with three oars at the lower left, a sign of the biblical floods. He did not intend these hieroglyphic forms to be read liter-ally, so he veiled them in washes of brilliant color. Though the artist carefully prepared this large work with many pre-liminary drawings and oil sketches, he preserved a sense of spontaneous, unpremeditated freedom in the final painting.
Kandinsky, Several Circles, 1926
Deliberately limited himself only with one form, the circle, Kandinsky focused all his attention on other aspects such as colours and masses and their relative position on the canvas which determine the composition. In addition, "Several Circles" unlike many of Kandinsky's abstract works have no any objective connotations. It is a pure abstraction. the transparent color circles float serenely across one another above an indeterminate, gray-black ground, like planets orbiting through space. It is hardly surprising that the artist revered the circle as a "link with the cosmic" and as a form that "points most clearly to the fourth dimension."
Modersohn-Becker, Self portrait 1906
Her Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary (fig. 6.2) fuses the conventional theme of the artist's self-portrait with the favored modernist motif of the nude woman. Far from treating the nude female form as simply a cipher for formal experimentation. She reveals herself frankly in the full bloom of her pregnancy. Artists' self-portraits have long served as a means to represent their claims to authorship. Here, Modersohn-Becker asserts her body as a source for artistic creation and the creation of life itself. With this gesture, she not only invents a genre of portraiture unavailable to male artists, but she also reclaims the female nude as a fully human subject, not simply another formal motif that might just as well be a still life. Modersohn-Becker's insistence on endowing the female nude with creative and intellectual agency extended beyond her self-portraits to encompass her depictions of women more generally. Her approach differed from that of many of her contemporaries, who equated the female body with humanity's instinctive and irrational character.
Lam, The Jungle, 1943
In The Jungle, Lam blends Afro-Cuban and African artistic and cultural traditions with the European modernist movements of Cubism and Surrealism. At nearly eight feet high by just over seven-and-a-half feet wide, this gouache on paper and canvas composition can feel immersive or engulfing. Four part-human, part-animal figures, with exaggerated hands and feet and faces recalling African masks, stand side-by-side. In Cubist fashion, their bodies are fragmented into individual parts that do not seem to fit together logically. With their fantastic appearance, they seem as if they could have sprung from the artist's dreams or possibly from his unconscious, the workings of the mind that especially interested the Surrealists. The figures seem to simultaneously emerge from and merge with a dense wall of vegetation composed of thick, banded stalks suggestive of the sugarcane that grew in the fields the slaves worked. The rightmost figure holds a pair of shears, a possible reference to harvesting, while the leftmost figure, with its horse-like features, could be seen to hint at one of the spirits in Afro-Cuban mysticism. Since Lam chose a color palette of blues and greens, with touches of yellow and white, this could be read as a moonlit night scene, or as taking place during the day, under the cover of the deep shade of the jungle.
Soutine Woman in Red, 1924-5
In Woman in Red (fig. 11.2) the sitter is posed diagonally across an armchair over which her voluminous red dress flows. The red of the dress permeates her face and hands; it is picked up in her necklace and in the red-brown tonality of the ground. Only the deep blue-black of the hat stands out against it. Soutine endows the static figure with tremendous vitality and movement, as the undulating surface rhythms swerve back and forth across the canvas. The hands are dis-torted as though from arthritis, and the features of the face are twisted into a slight grin.
Kirshner Street Dresden, 1907
Is an assembly of curvilinear figures who undulate like wraiths, moving toward and away from the viewer without individual motive, drifting in a world of dreams. Kirchner probably had Munch's Street painting Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street in mind when he made this work, and, as was frequently his habit, he reworked it at a much later date. In Berlin he painted a series of street scenes in which the spaces are confined and precipitously tilted, and the figures are elongated into angular shards by long feathered strokes. Kirchner made rapid sketches of these street scenes, then worked up the images in more formal drawings in his studio before making the final paintings.
Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905
It is a large-scale painting depicting an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. The references are many, but in form and date, Bonheur de Vivre is closest to Cézanne's last great image of bathers. Yet the figure groups are deployed as separate vignettes, isolated from one another spatially as well as by their differing colors and contradictory scales.
Modigliani, Nude, 1917
Modigliani also painted anonymous stu-dents or children—anyone who would pose for him without a fee. For his paintings of nudes, however, he frequently relied on professional models. Modigliani developed a fairly standard formula for his compositions of reclining nudes. The attenuated figure is normally arranged along a diagonal and set within a narrow space, her legs eclipsed by the edge of the canvas. The figure is outlined with a flow-ing but precise line, while the full volumes are modeled with almost imperceptible gradations of flesh tones. For his paintings of nudes, he frequently assumed a point of view above the figure, thus establishing a perspective that implies the subject's sexual availability to the artist and (presumably male) viewers.
Varo Celestial Pablum, 1958
She was born in Anglés , Spain in 1908 and died from a heart-attack in Mexico City in 1963 . During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris w she was largely influenced by the surrealist movement. She was forced into exile from Paris during the Nazi occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941. She initially considered Mexico a temporary haven, but would remain in Latin America for the rest of her life. In Mexico she met native artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera . However, her strongest ties would be to other exiles and expatriates, and especially her extraordinary friendship with the English painter Leonora Carrington . Her last major relationship would be with Walter Gruen, an Austrian who had endured concentration camps before escaping Europe . Gruen believed fiercely in Varo, and gave her the support that allowed her to fully concentrate on her painting. After 1949 Varo developed into her mature and remarkable style, which remains beautifully enigmatic and instantly recognizable. She often worked in oil on masonite panels she prepared herself. Although her colors have the blended resonance of the oil medium, her brushwork often involved many fine strokes of paint laid closely together - a technique more reminiscent of egg tempera. She died at the height of her powers. Her work continues to achieve successful retrospectives at major sites in Mexico and the United States Please be patient with the Post Service sometimes the things delay; tubes are hand sorted and it is not like the envelopes which are automated. International shipping offer, ask for rates.
Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass, 1912
Synthetic Cubism, Picasso assembled his collage from seven pieces of paper, cut and pasted to a wallpaper ground. Each of these pieces of paper remains a discrete representational element within the composition, which as a whole represents a guitar hanging on a wall. ...[T]he central portion of the guitar's body appears as a negative shape, defined only by the paper elements that surround it. ...The effect of transparency is all the more remarkable in the collage for having been achieved with opaque and clearly flat shapes. Against the seemingly transparent surface of the hollow and partly overlapping the blue bridge of the guitar, Picasso pasted a white circle representing a sound hole, thereby reenacting the reversal of recessed and projecting forms that had animated the constructed "Guitar".
Lissitzky, The Constructor, 1924
The Constructor, which puts the act of seeing at center stage. Lissitzky's hand, holding a compass, is superimposed on a shot of his head that explicitly highlights his eye: insight, it expresses, is passed through the eye and transmitted to the hand, and through it to the tools of production. Devised from six different exposures, the picture merges Lissitzky's personae as photographer (eye) and constructor of images (hand) into a single likeness. Contesting the idea that straight photography provides a single, unmediated truth, Lissitzky held instead that montage, with its layering of one meaning over another, impels the viewer to reconsider the world. It thus marks a conceptual shift in the understanding of what a picture can be.
Gropius & Meyer Fagus Shoe Factory, 1911-25
The Fagus building represents a sensational innovation in its utilization of complete glass sheathing, even at the corners. In effect, Gropius here had invented the curtain wall that would play such a visible role in the form of subsequent large-scale twentieth-century architecture.
Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933
The Human Condition (fig. 14.23), where we encounter a pleasant landscape framed by a window. In front of this opening is a painting on an easel that "completes" the very landscape it blocks from view. The problem of real space versus spatial illusion is as old as painting itself, but it is imaginatively treated in this picture within a picture. Magritte's classic play on illusion implies that the painting is less real than the landscape, when in fact both are painted fictions.
Dix Skat Players, 1920
The Skat Players—Card Playing War Invalids (fig. 10.33) shows a trio of veterans engaged in a tragi-comic game of cards. War injuries have left them all as amputees, forced to hold their cards between their toes or with a mangled hand. Faces, too, have been damaged, along with ears, eyes, and skulls, leaving the men to cope with poorly fitting facial and scalp prostheses. Simultaneously horrify-ing, pathetic, and ridiculous, Dix's treatments of the war refuse to let the viewer settle into a single, easy response. His images are as angry and fatalistic as they are wrench-ing. The bright, lurid colors he often uses lend an intensity evocative of the bright pigments of commercial imagery such as posters and popular prints. His paintings initially seduce with their candy store hues before slapping the viewer with their shocking realism.
Duchamp The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors or The Large Glass, 1915-23
The action begins in the upper left corner with the "Bride," the element that resembles a bug or a tree. She flirts by stripping for the "Bachelors" in the lower register. The Bachelors are the nine vaguely anthropomorphic cylinders in the lower left section of the glass, and they think the Bride is very attractive. Each Bachelor is trying to win her affection, but they exist in a completely different zone, and are having a hard time communicating with her. If you look closely, you can see nine small holes on the right side of the Bride's register, which Duchamp marked by firing matches with paint on the tips through a toy cannon. Unfortunately, only one of those shots even came close to its target. Thus, the Bachelors cannot reach the Bride and their love for her remains unfulfilled.
Tatlin Model for Monument to the Third International, 1920
The monument is full of straight and diagonal lines yet makes a very dynamic movement upward. Tatlin was fascinated with movement in art. While the model of the monument was made of wood and wires, the building itself was to be made of steel. This material could have signified the confidence and certainty of the Russian government, and that it would take extreme amounts of power to break it down. The lack of color from the steel could have suggested the simplicity and pure intentions of the Russian administration, as well as signaling the industrial power of the country.
Kollwitz, The Volunteers, 1922-23
The second image from this series of seven scenes shows a group of young men following Death, who beats out the march to battle on a drum (fig. 10.27). With their gaunt faces contorted by expressions of fear, regret, and even hope, the youths attend to the crooked hand of Death urging them on. Already, though, an arc fills the space above the figures, suggesting a rainbow or halo: the harbinger of their fate as martyrs for a pointless cause. Kollwitz's youngest son had been killed just days after entering into the war in 1914, an event that only sharpened her activism. Although best known for her black-and-white prints and posters of politi-cal subjects, Kollwitz could be an exquisite colorist.
Mondrian Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930
The total structure is emphatic, not simply containing the color rectangles but functioning as a counterpoint to them. Both red and gray areas are divided into larger and smaller rectangles with black lines. The black rectangles, since they are transpositions of lines to planes, act as further unifying elements between line and color. The edges of the painting are left open. Along the top and in the lower left corner, the verticals do not quite go to the edge, with the consequence that the grays at these points surround the ends of the lines. Only in the lower right does the black come to the edge, and this is actually a black area through which the line moves slightly to the left of the edge. Mondrian sought—an absolute but dynamic balance of ver-tical and horizontal structure, using primary hues and black and white—is thus achieved.
Giacometti Femmer egordee, 1932
This is the most macabre of Giacometti's surrealist sculptures. Although the figure appears to be dying, the shape of the body resembles a mantrap or the jaws of a fly-eating plant. The right leg folds under the abdomen to form an aggressive spiky rib cage. A tiny nick can be seen in the throat, as the figure gasps for breath. The sculpture may have been inspired by a short story about the serial killer Jack the Ripper, written by one of the artist's friends. Such a gruesome subject is often considered taboo in art, which is perhaps why the artist chose it.
Rodchenko Poster, 1924
This poster arguably brought Rodchenko the most fame and appreciation from his patrons in the Soviet government. The composition is typical of his use of photomontage in the period (the combination of photography and text). And it also reflects the ways in which he updated Russian advertising, using geometric compositions and strident colors to trumpet modernity. While his designs are directed at promoting individual companies or products, they also - often explicitly - endorse the goals of political revolution.
Brancusi Torso of a Young Man, 1924
Went as far as Brancusi ever did in the direction of geometric form. In this polished bronze from 1924, he abstracted the softened, swelling lines of anatomy introduced in his earlier wood versions of the sculpture into an object of machine-like precision. Brancusi was clearly playing on a theme of androgyny here, for while the Torso is decidedly phallic, it could also constitute an interpretation of female anatomy.
Ernst, Surrealism and Painting, 1942
also the title of a book by Breton, shows a bird-like beast made of smoothly rounded sections of human anatomy, serpents, and birds' heads. The monster, painted in delicate hues, is composing an abstract painting, perhaps "automatically." In fact, Ernst engaged in a partially automatic process to create the paint-ing—he swung paint over the canvas from a hole in a tin can. The full implications of this "drip" technique would be explored by Jackson Pollock to make his revolutionary, mural-sized abstract paintings in the late 1940s and the 1950s (see fig. 16.8).
Ernst, Surrealism and Painting, 1942
also, the title of a book by Breton shows a bird-like beast made of smoothly rounded sections of human anatomy, serpents, and birds' heads. The monster, painted in delicate hues, is composing an abstract painting, perhaps "automatically." In fact, Ernst engaged in a partially automatic process to create the painting he swung paint over the canvas from a hole in a tin can. The full implications of this "drip" technique would be explored by Jackson Pollock to make his revolutionary, mural-sized abstract paintings in the late 1940s and the 1950s (see fig. 16.8).
Grosz Republican Automatons, 1920
applies the style and motifs of De Chirico and the Metaphysical School to political satire, as empty-headed, blank-faced, and mutilated automatons parade loyally through the streets of a mechanistic metropolis on their way to vote as they are told. In such works as this, Grosz comes closest to the spirit of the Dadaists and Surrealists. But he expressed his most passionate convictions in draw-ings and paintings that continue an Expressionist tradition of savagely denouncing a decaying Germany of brutal profiteers and obscene prostitutes, and of limitless gluttony and sensuality in the face of abject poverty, disease, and death.
Schwitters, Hannover Merz-Building, 1931
series of great constructions that he called Merz-Column or Merzbau (fig. 10.24), the culmination of his attempts to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. The Merzbau grew throughout the 1920s with successive accretions of every kind of material until it filled the room. Having no place to go but up, he continued the environ-mental construction with implacable logic into the second story.When he was driven from Germany by the Nazis and his original Merzbau was destroyed, Schwitters started another one in Norway. The Nazi invasion forced him to England, where he began again for the third time. After his death in 1948, the third Merzbau was rescued and preserved in the University of Newcastle.
