Study Guide 3

Georgia O'Keeffe CITY NIGHT

- (192), she began to paint New York skyscrapers --- which were acclaimed at the time as embodiments of American inventiveness and energy. --- But paintings such as city night are not unambiguous celebrations of lofty buildings. - portrays the skyscrapers from a low vantage point so that they appear to loom ominously over the viewer; - dark tonalities, stark forms, and exaggerated perspective produce a sense of menace that also appears in the art of other American Modernists.

Surrealism

- (France, early 1930) a group had a very different approach to modernism in a revolt against logic/reason - Embracing irrational, disorderly, aberrant, and even violent social interventions, --- Surrealism emerged initially as an offshoot of Dada, born from the mind of poet André Breton - interest in unexpected juxtapositions of disparate realities - argued that by bringing together several disparate ordinary objects in strange new contexts artists could create uncanny surrealities. --- ex. object (luncheon in fur)

Futurism

- (in italy) Cubism developed into Futurism -- an emphasis on portraying technology and a sense of speed - (1908) Italy was a state in crisis - huge disparities of wealth separated the north from the south; ---- 4/5 of the country was illiterate; poverty and near-starvation were rampant; and 50,000 ppl had recently died in one of the nation's worst earthquakes - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Milanese poet and editor) -----published "Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" on the front page of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro - attacked everything old, dull, and "feminine" and proposed to shake Italy free of its past - by embracing an exhilarating, "masculine," "futuristic," and even dangerous world based on the thrill, speed, energy, and power of modern urban life. - "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting," (by group of Milan, artists followed Marinetti's manifesto with this) --- they demanded that "all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever, and of speed." - some of these artists traveled to Paris for a Futurist exhibition in 1912, ---- after which they used the visual forms of Cubism to express in art their love of machines, speed, and war. - Russian (also known as Cubo-Futurists) claiming to have emerged independently of Italian Futurism began to move increasingly toward abstraction. --- drew on Futurist tendencies to celebrate technology and the aesthetic of speed.

Japonisme

- A style in French and American nineteenth-century art that was highly influenced by Japanese art, especially prints. HOW COMMERSE CREATED - Japan was forcibly open by US Navy to Western trade abd diplomacy in 1853 - 2 years later, when France, England, Russia, and the United States signed trade agreements that permitted regular exchange of goods, --- Japanese art became available to European and American artists - one of first works that engaged attention of modern painters was sketckbook called Manga MANGA - one of first works caught attentiom of modern painters - sketckbook by Katsushika Hokusai - passed eagerly around JAPONISME - Paris International Exposition of 1867 hosted the first exhibition of Japanese prints in Europe - soon, Japanese lacquers, fans, bronzes, hanging scrolls, kimonos, ceramics, illustrated books, and ukiyo-e (prints of the "floating world," the realm of geishas and popular entertainment) began to appear for sale in specialty shops, art galleries, and even some department store - became fashionable in artworld to collect Japanese items for home - French obsession with Japan and its art reach such a level art critic Philippe Burty gave it a name, Japonisme EFFECT ON WESTERN ART - effect on Western painting and printmaking, and eventually also on architecture, but the influence was extraordinarily diverse - how artists responded depended on own intrests --- Whistler found encouragement for his purely aesthetic conception of art, liberated from Renaissance rules of representation and perspective. --- Degas discovered both realistic subjects and complex, diagonal compositional arrangements and elevated viewpoints. - those interested in reform of late 19th cen industrial design found in Japanese objects both the fine craft and honest elegance they thought lacking in the West. ukiyo-e - prints of the "floating world," the realm of geishas and popular entertainment

Frank Lloyd Wright

- America's most important Modernist architect - one of the most influential architects in the world during the early twentieth century - briefly studied at University of Wisconsin --- apprenticed to a Chicago architect, then spent five years with the firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, advancing to the post of chief drafter - (1893) Wright established his own office --- specialized in domestic architecture PRARIE SCHOOL - ~1900, he +several other architects in the Oak Park suburb of Chicago—together known as the Prairie School— --- began to design low, horizontal houses with flat roofs and heavy overhangs that echoed the flat plains of the prairie in the Midwest. - Prarie style: using the aesthetic of the prairie and indigenous prairie pants for landscape design to create mostly domestic homes and small public buildings

Abstract Expressionism

- American artists were most deeply affected by the work of the European Surrealist artists in New York, --- developed their own identity but drew from European and American Modernism ---—coming to be known as Abstract Expressionists. - describes the art of a fairly wide range of artists in New York in the 1940s and early 1950s. - not a formally organized movement, but a loosely affiliated group of artists who worked in the city --- bound by a common purpose: to express their profound social alienation after World War II and make a new kind of art. - influential Formalist (valuing form over content) critic Clement Greenberg urged the Abstract Expressionists to consider their paintings "autonomous" and completely self-referential objects (see clement) - Also Influenced by Carl Jung shared a commitment to two major projects: (1) an interest in the traditional history of painting, but a desire to rebel against it, including the recent ideas of European Modernism and (2) a desire to treat the act of painting on canvas as a self-contained expressive, even heroic, exercise that would communicate universal ideas.

Joan Miró {BIOMORPHIC ABSTRACTION (surrealism)}

- Catalan artist - exhibited regularly with the Surrealists but never formally joined the movement. biomorphic abstraction: - is also intended to free the mind from rationality, but in a more benign manner. - images seem to take shape before our eyes, but their identity is always in flux

Francis Bacon

- England, self-taught and produced very few pictures until the 1940s - served as an air-raid warden during World War II --- saw the bloody impact of the bombing of civilians in London firsthand - captured in his canvases the horrors that haunted him

Dorothea Lange

- Resettlement Agency (RA) and Farm Security Administration and Photographers - San Francisco-based RA/FSA photographer - documented the plight of migrant farm laborers who fled the Dust Bowl conditions of the Great Plains and then crowded California looking for work.

Georgia O'Keefe

- Stieglitz "discovered" Georgia O'Keeffe — born in rural Wisconsin, and already studying and teaching art between 1905 and 1915 ---- when a New York friend showed him some of her charcoal drawings. Stieglitz's reported response was "At last, a woman on paper!" - (1916) he included O'Keeffe's work in a group show at 291 and mounted her first solo exhibition the following year. -- moved to New York in 1918 and married Stieglitz in 1924.

Expressionism

- Van Gogh produced painting that contributed to the emergence - in which the intensity of an artist's emotional state would override any desire for fidelity to the actual appearance of things.

Automatism (surrealism)

- a technique in which artists abandon the usual control over their brushes or pencils to allow the subconscious to create the artwork without rational interference --- in order to produce surprising new imagery and forms frottage and grattage - a design produced by laying a piece of paper over a textured surface and rubbing with charcoal or other soft medium - laying a painted canvas on a textured surface and then scraping the paint away, then "revealing" the imagery he saw in the paint with additional painting

Realism

- amound strife - a new intelectual movement known as realism originated in the novels of Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and others who wrote about the real lives of the urban lower classes. - less of a style, more of a commitment to paint modern world honestly, whithout turning away from brutal truths "Realism" Beyond france - artists of other nations embraced own forms of realism in period after 1850 as the social effects of urbanization/industrialization began to be felt in their countries - these artists did not label themselves as realists like their contemps in france --- but they did share an interest in presenting unflinching looks at reality that exposed the difficult lives of the working poor and the complexities of urban life Realism in Russia and the wanderers - variant on french Realism developed in relation to a new concern for peasentry - 1861 tsar abolished serfdom, emancipating russias peasants from the virtual they had endured on the large estates of the aristocracy - 2 years later, a group of painters inspired by the emancipation declared allegience both to the peasant cause and to freedom from the St. Petersburg Academy of Art (which had controlled Russian art since 1754) - reacting against what they considered the escapist aesthetics of the academy, the members of the group dedicated themselves to a socially useful realism - commited to bringing art to people in traveling g exhibitions, they called themselves "the Wanderers." - late 1870s, members of the group, like their counterparts in music and literature, had also joined a nationalist movement to reassert what they considered to be an authentic Russian culture rooted in the traditions of the peasantry, rejecting the Western European customs that had long predominated among the Russian aristocracy. Realism in United States States - not a term used in united states - often with a political edge --- tradition stretching back to colonial portrait painters and continuing in the pioneering work of photographers during the Civil War - several kinds of realism in later 19th cen amercan art English realism - encountered social/political upheaval at the middle of 19 cen - depression of "hungry forties," Irish Potato Famine, and the Chartist Riots threatened social stability in England - mid centry artists painted scenes of religious, medieval, or moral exemplars --- tight, realistic style that was quite different from both frech and american realism - other British artists drew inspiration from the medieval past as a panacea for modern life in London Pre-Raphaelites - (1848) 7 young london artists formed pre raphaelite brotherhood in response (what they considered) misguided practices of contemporary British art - instead of "Raphaeleque" conventions taught at Royal Academy, the Pre-Raphaelites looked back to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance (before Raphael) for a beauty and spirituality that they found lacking in their own time --- earlier art was more moralistic and "real"

Francis Bacon, Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef, 1954

- an anguished/insubstantial man howling in a black void - two bloody sides of beef enclose him in a claustrophobic box that contains his screams and amplifies his terror - directly inspired by Velázquez's 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X and by Rembrandt's paintings of dripping meat .- Bacon wrote, "I hope to make the best human cry in painting ... to remake the violence of reality itself."

Pop art

- art based on modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values. - artists focused attention on the mid-cen explosion in visual culture -- was fueled by the growing mass media and the disposable income of the postwar generation. - Pop art originated in Britain in the years soon after World War II, --- but its primary development was in the United States in the early 1960s - First seen in the cool, slick aesthetic of New York artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, ---- variations of Pop Art soon emerged in Chicago and along the West Coast to reflect regional distinctions in consumer tastes and popular culture. -Homes, automobiles, and luxury products reflected life as it appeared on television, in films, and in print advertising, -- the visible display of one's possessions was increasingly seen as an indication of personal identity and social standing. - Pop artists seemed to both embrace and possibly critique the superficial fiction of a perfect life.

Modernismo

- art nouveau spread all across europe, in spain it was called Modernismo, -- the major practitioner was the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí I Cornet - GAUDI integrated natural forms into the design of buildings and parks that are still revolutionary in their dynamic freedom of line.

Georgia O'Keeffe JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT, NO. IV

- began to exhibit a series of close-up paintings of flowers, which became her best-known subjects - O'Keeffe brings the heart of the flower to the front and center of the picture plane, revealing its inner forms and surfaces - By painting the flower's hidden, organic aspects rather than the way it looks to a distant viewer, --- she creates from it a new abstract beauty, distilling the vigor of the plant's life force - Critics described O'Keeffe's flower paintings as elementally feminine and vaginal, and Stieglitz did little to dissuade viewers from this reading - In fact, he promoted it—in spite of O'Keeffe's strong objections to this critical caricature and its implicit pigeonholing of her as a "woman artist." - 1929, O'Keeffe began spending summers in New Mexico; she moved there permanently in the 1940s, dedicating her art to evocative representations of the local landscape and culture.

Picasso

- born in Málaga, Spain, Picasso was an artistic child prodigy - During his teenage years at the National Academy in Madrid, he painted highly polished works that presaged a conservative artistic career ,--- but his restless temperament led him to Barcelona in 1899, where he involved himself in avant-garde circles. - (1900) he first traveled to Paris, and in 1904 he moved there and would live in France for the rest of his life - during early period Picasso painted rban outcasts in weary poses using a coldly expressive blue palette that led art historians to label this his Blue Period --- seemed motivated by his political sensitivity to those he considered victims of modern capitalist society, which eventually led him to join the Communist Party. - (1904-1905) Picasso joined a larger group of Paris-based avant-garde artists and became fascinated with the subject of saltimbanques ("traveling acrobats") --- rarely painted them performing but instead the hardships they endured - became one of the 1st artists in Paris to use images from African art in paintings - (1906) Louvre installed newly acquired collection of sculpture from the Iberian peninsula (present day Spain and Portugal) dating from the 6/5 centuries bce. - Picasso saw these works but it was an exhibition of African masks that inspired him --- exact date of encounter unknown, maybe at Musée d'Éthnographie du Trocadéro, which had opened to public in 1878 - greatly admired expressive power/formal strangeness of African masks (relatively inexpensive, he bought several and kept them in studio - didn't care to understand cultures he represented - Picassos friends shocked by new work --- Matisse, accused Picasso of making a joke of Modern art and threatened to break off their friendship ---- Georges Braque, enthusiastically embraced Picasso's radical ideas—he saw in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon a potential for new visual experiments. - Picasso/Braque began a close working relationship that lasted until the latter went to war in 1914. -- together Picassos developed formal innovations by flattening pictorial space, incorporating multiple perspectives within a single picture, and fracturing form, all features that they had admired in Cézanne's late paintings. According to Braque, "We were like two mountain climbers roped together."

Hannah Höch CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE DADA THROUGH THE LAST WEIMAR BEER-BELLY CULTURAL EPOCH IN GERMANY

- combines images and words from the popular press, political posters, and photographs --- to create a complex and angry critique of the Weimar Republic in 1919. - includes portraits of androgynous Dada characters, such as herself and several other Berlin Dada artists, ---along with pictures of Marx and Lenin, asserting the artists' solidarity with revolutionaries in opposition to the anti-Dadaists whose images are gathered in the upper right corner.

Picasso: Guernica, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

- contact with African art had huge impact on impact on this - one of most radical/complex paintings of 20th centry - "Demoiselle" was a common euphemism for prostitute at this time - Avignon was the name of a street in the red-light district in Barcelona. - large scale painting - overturned conventions not only for depicting female nude, but also 3/d space on canvas - imitates size of academic historical painting - relaxed, seductive positions of the Two figures refer to traditional depictions of goddess Veus rising from sea - figures angular bodies and blank facial features counteract passive poses. - rigid posture and striding stance of this figure recall those of an Ancient Greek kouros - portraying female sexuality as strong - shattered

Fauvism

- critic Louis Vauxcelles described the young painters as fauves ("wild beasts") filled with such brilliant colors and blunt brushwork SALON d'AUTOMNE (Autumn Salon) - group of disconnected artists organized and founded it - named to distinguish it from the official Salon that took place every spring - Autumn Salon provided a showcase for progressive artists, and many major Modernist movements of the twentieth century made their debut in this Salon's disorderly halls - paintings exhibited in 1905 by André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck --- filled with such brilliant colors and blunt brushwork that the critic Louis Vauxcelles described the young painters as fauves ("wild beasts"), the French term by which they soon became known - artists took the French tradition of color and strong brushwork to new heights of intensity and expressive power and entirely rethought the painting's surface . - amount first major Fauve works were paintings that Derain and Matisse ----made in 1905 in the French Mediterranean port town of Collioure

Joan Miro: Composition

- curving biomorphic primal or mythic shapes that seem arranged by chance ---- emerge from the artist's mind uncensored, like doodles, to dance around the canvas. - like surrealist who used free association: Miró reportedly doodled on many of his canvases as a first step of creation - this work was based on a collage assembled from advertisements cut from catalogs, magazines, and newspapers - Miro was fascinated by children's art, which he thought of as spontaneous and expressive - although was he was a well trained artist, wished he could paint with freedom of a child

Moulin de la Galette, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

- depicts a convivial crowd relaxing on a Sunday afternoon at an old-fashioned dance hall—the Moulin de la Galette (the "Pancake Mill") ---in the Montmartre area of Paris, which opened its outdoor courtyard during good weather. - glamorizes the working -class clientele by placing his attractive bourgeois artist friends and their models among them, striking poses of relaxed congeniality, smiling, dancing, and chatting - underscores the innocence of their flirtations = children in the painting in the lower left, while emphasizing the ease of social relations through the relaxed informality of the scene - overall mood knit together by the dappled sunlight falling through the trees and Renoir's soft brushwork weaving blues and purples through the crowd and around the canvas - naive carefree image of innocent leisure, bourgeois paradise removed from the real world --—encapsulates Renoir's idea of the essence of art: "For me a picture should be a pleasant thing, joyful and pretty—yes pretty! There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need for us to manufacture more."

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (black/white)

- discovered that a plate coated with light -sensitive chemicals and exposed to light for 20 to 30 minutes would reveal a "latent image" when later exposed to mercury vapors - 1837, he had developed a method of fixing his image by bathing the plate in a solution of salt, and he vastly improved the process by using the chemical hyposulfate of soda (known as "hypo") as suggested by Sir John Frederick Herschel (1792-1871) - Final image was negative --- but when viewed with a highly polished silver plate upon it it apeared positive - resulting photo could not be duplicated easily and was very fragile but its quality was precise

Hannah Höch

- even more pointed political photomontages than Kurt Schwitters - Between 1916-1926, worked for Ullstein Verlag, Berlin's largest publishing house, --- designing decorative patterns and writing articles on crafts for a women's magazine - Höch considered herself part of the women's movement in the 1920s and disapproved of contemporary mass-media representations of women - had to fight for her place as the sole woman in the Berlin Dada group, -----one of whose male members described her contribution disparagingly as merely conjuring up beer and sandwiches.

Gustave Courbet: The Stonebreakers

- first of two large canvases - depicts a young boy/old man crushing rocks for gravelu sed for roadbeds - represent disenfranchised peasants on whos backs modern life was being built - the younger figure strains to lift large basket of rocks on side of road -dressed in tatters but wearing modern work boots - older seemingly broken by lowly workpounds the rocks as he kneels wearing more traditional clorthing of a peasant --- wooden clogs - boy rep grim future - man rep increasingly absolete rural past --- both are faceless - canvas is 5x 8, monumental canvases reserved for heros (he is saying they are heros) - rough use of paint and dull, dark use of color, awkward poses and stilted composition signifies brutality of madorn life - "I stopped to consider two men breaking stones on the highway. It's rare to meet the most complete expression of poverty, so an idea for a picture came to me on the spot. I made an appointment with them at my studio for the next day.... On the one side is an old man, seventy.... On the other side is a young fellow ... in his filthy tattered shirt.... Alas, in labor such as this, one's life begins that way, and it ends the same way." -- set out to make a political statement and invited men back to studio to study them more carefully - "an irony of our industrial civilization, which continually invents wonderful machines to perform all kinds of labor ... yet is unable to liberate man from the most backbreaking toil." Courbet himself described the work as a portrayal of "injustice." -- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon his friend the anarchist philosopher

André Breton (founder of Surrealism) DADA

- founder of surrealism (surrealism was offshoot of dada, born from Brenton) - trained in medicine and psychiatry and served in a neurological hospital during World War I --- where he used Freudian analysis on shell-shocked soldiers - by 1912 (still drawn to the vagaries of the human mind) published the "Manifesto of Surrealism," ---- reflecting Freud's conception of the human mind as a battleground where the forces of the unconscious wage a constant war against the rational, orderly, and oppressive forces of the conscious - sought to explore humanity's most base, irrational, and forbidden sexual desires, secret fantasies, and violent instincts by freeing the conscious mind from reason - he wrote: "we still live under the rule of logic." --- To escape this restraint, he and other Surrealists developed strategies to liberate the unconscious using dream analysis, free association, automatic writing, word games, and hypnotic trances - SURREALISTS studied acts of "criminal madness" and the "female mind" in particular, --- believing the female to be weaker and more irrational than the male mind. - Brenton believed only way to improve warlock society (1920) was to discover the more intense "surreality" that transcended rational constraint.

En plein air

- french also began painting en plein air in effort to record the fleerting effects of light and atmosphere by applying many small touches of pure color directly on canvas - also greatly facilitated by invention of collapisble metal tubes for oil paint - boreing prep of acedemic painting, impressionists saught to caupture it before it left

Symbolism (Edvard Munch)

- international movement in art/literature championed by a loose affiliation of artists interested in the irrational aspects of the human mind - facination with the dark recesses of the psyche emerged last decades of 19th century --- encompassing photographic and scientific examinations of the nature of insanity as well as a popular interest in the spirit world of mediums - some sought escape from modern life in irrational worlds of unrestrained emotion as described by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, whose terrifying stories of the supernatural were popular across Europe - not coincidence that sig frued, who compared artistic creation to the process of dreaming, wrote his pioneering The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) during this period. - rejected value placed on rationalism/materlial in modern western culture --- choosing instead to explore realms of emotion, imagination, and spirituality - saught deeper/more mysterious reality beyound everyday life --- they conveyed through strange, ambiguous subject matter and stylized forms that suggest hidden and elusive meanings. They often compared their works to dreams. - originated in france but had a profound impact on the avant-garde in other countries, it often took Expressionist tendencies Exhibitions - like other smaller groups, staged independant art exhibition --- unlike the Impressionists, who hired halls, printed programs, and charged a small admission fee for their exhibitions, ---- the Symbolists mounted modest shows with little expectation of public interest -----During the 1889 Universal Exposition, for example, hung a few works in a café close to the fairgrounds, almost unnoticed by the press. Symbolism in writing (Joris-Karl Huysmans) - in painting closely paralleled a similar movement among poets and writers - Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel À Rebours (Against the Grain) ---- single character, an aristocrat named Des Esseintes, who locks himself away from the world because "Imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things." ---- Claiming that nature was irrelevant, Des Esseintes muses that "Nature has had her day" and "wearied aesthetes" should take refuge in artworks "steeped in ancient dreams or antique corruptions, far removed from the manner of our present day." Critisicism - Louis Leroy - exhibition recieved some positive reviews - but one critic, Louis Leroy, writing in the satirical journal Le Charivari, seized upon the title of Claude Monet's painting Impression: Sunrise (see fig. 31-28) and dubbed the entire exhibition "impressionist." - rediculed the fast, open brushstrokes and unfinshed looks -- monet and colleagues embraced term because it aptly descibed aim of rendering the instantaneous impression and fleeting moment in paint

Matisse: Le Bonheur de Vivre

- large pastoral landscape depicting a golden age --- a reclining nude in the foreground plays pan pipes, another piper herds goats in the right mid-ground, lovers embrace in the foreground, and others dance in the background - like Cezannes the Large Bathers b/c is academic in scale and theme, but avant-garde in most other respects—notably in the way the figures appear "flattened" and in the distortion of the spatial relations between them. - emphasized expressive color, drawing on folk art traditions of unmodeled forms and bold outlines - in past, artists may have expressed feeling through figures poses or facial expressions, but now --- "The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.... The chief aim of color should be to serve expression as well as possible."

camera

- light proof box with a hole called an aperture that is usually adjustable in size and regulates the amount of light that strikes the film - the aperture is covered with a lense which focuses ob the film, and a shutter, a hinged flap that opens for a controlled amount of time to regulate how long the film is exposed to light (usually a fraction of a second) - glass plate was coated with a variety of emulsions, when the shutter is open, light reflected off objects enters the camera and strikes the fil, exposing it - pale objects reflect more light than dark ones - the silver in emulsion collects more densly In places where it is exposed to the most light: prodcing a negative --later, when placed in a chemical bath the silver turns black --- the film negative is plaved over a sheet of paper that been traeted to make it light sensitive -- multible prints can be generated

Frank Lloyd Wright COLOR RECONSTRUCTION OF THE DINING ROOM, FREDERICK C. ROBIE HOUSE

- machine-cut components create the chairs' modern geometric designs, --- their high backs huddle around the table to form the intimate effect of a room within a room. - integrated lights and flower holders into posts near the table's corners --- so that there would be no need for lights or flowers on the table.

Collage

- many works of Picasso and Braque -- (French, to glue) - composed of separate elements past together

Camera obscura

- means "dark chamber" - early device which consists of a darkend room or box with a lens through which light passes - projecting an upsidedown image of a scene onto opposite wall which artist can trace - Camera Lucinda: portable version, standard equipment for artists

Marcel Duchamp/readymades

- not formal member of Dada --- but Marcel Duchamp created some of its most complex and challenging works. - took Dada to New York when crossed the Atlantic to escape war - In Paris in 1912, Duchamp had experimented with Cubism, painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, ---- become of the most controversial works included in the notorious Armory Show in New York in 1913 - by the time he arrived in US he discarded painting --- he claimed had become for him a mindless activity READYMADE AND SHOW W?FOUTAIN - Only made a few ready mades - had devised the Dada genre that he termed the readymade, in which he transformed ordinary, often manufactured objects into works of art. - warmly welcomed into American art world - American Society of Independent Artists invited him to become a founding member, --he chaired the hanging committee for its annual exhibition in 1917 --- show was unjuried—any work of art submitted with the entry fee of $6 would be hung - anonymous submission was a common porcelain urinal that he purchased in a plumber's shop and turned on its side so that it was no longer functional, signing it "R. Mutt" in a play on the name of the urinal's manufacturer, J. L. Mott Iron Works. It was rejected. - questions the essence of what constitutes a work of art. How much can be stripped away before an object's status as art disappears? - Since Whistler's famous court case, most avant-garde artists had agreed that a work of art did not have to be descriptive or well crafted, but before 1917, none would have argued, as --- Duchamp does in this piece, that art was primarily conceptual - arguing that art objects can actually be mass-produced for the artist by industry. - when it was rejected, the artist resigned from the Society of Independent Artists in mock horror. - l.h.o.o.q. and described as a "modified readymade." - after it stolen - "she's hot for it" - challenges traditional notions about what constitutes art and makes ridicule and bodily functions its central artistic content - "Dada was born of disgust.

Gustave Courbet

- one of first artist to call himself avant-garde or realist - big, blustery man "not only a Socialist but a democrat and a Republican: in a word, a supporter of the whole Revolution." - born/raised near swiss border in French twn of Ornans -- moved to paris (1839 - street fighting in paris radicalized him and catalyst for 2 large canvases that come to be regarded as the defining works of the realist movement - descibed himself described the work as a portrayal of "injustice." - after the rejection of some of his works by international exposition of 1855, constructed a temporary building that rented land near the fairs pavilion of art and installed a show of his own works --- he called the "Pavilion of Realism," boldly asserting his independence from the Salon - many artists would follow suit

Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House

- one of his early prarie style masterpieces - central chimney, above a fireplace (radiated heat throughout the house in the cold Chicago winter), --- forms the center of the sprawling design - Low, flat overhanging roofs (dramatically cantilevered on both sides of the chimney) shade against the summer sun, - open porches provide places to sleep outside on cool summer nights - Low bands of windows (many with stained glass) surround the house, creating a colored screen between the interior and the outside world, --- while also inviting those inside to look through the windows into the garden beyond. - main story is one long space divided into living and dining areas by a free-standing fireplace. - no dividing walls - Wright had visited the Japanese exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and was deeply influenced by the aesthetics of Japanese architecture, particularly its sense of space and screenlike windows - Wright's homes frequently featured built-in closets and bookcases, and he hid heating and lighting fixtures when possible --- also designed and arranged the furniture for his interiors

Julia Margaret Cameron, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle,

- one of most early created photographers - recieved first camera as a gift from daughters when 49 years - principal subjects were the great men/woman of british arts, letters, and sciences, many of whom long family friends - approach was experimental/radical - "When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man." - slightly out of focyswhile devolping negatives, purposefully blurres details, calling attention to light - consciously rejected the sharp focus of commercial portrait photography, which she felt accentuated the merely physical attributes and neglected the inner character of the subject

Dada

- one of the first movements to address the slaughter/moralquestion of WWI - transnational movement with distinct local manifestations that arose during the war in Zürich and New York, then spread to Berlin, Paris, Cologne, and Hannover - Modern Art questioned the traditions of art, Dada went further to question the concept of art itself - seeing the devastation of war, Dada mocked the senselessness of rational thought and even the foundations of modern society - embraced a "mocking iconoclasm" even in its name, had no real or fixed meaning - baby talk in German; in French it means "hobbyhorse"; in Romanian and Russian, "yes, yes"; in the Kru African dialect, "the tail of a sacred cow." - dismantled the conventional understanding of art as something precious, replacing it with a strange and irrational art focused on ideas and actions rather than objects. BERLIN DADA - (1917) Hugo Ball and the Romanian-born poet Tristan Tzara organized the Galerie Dada in Zürich - Tzara also edited magazine Dada, -- quickly attracted the attention of like-minded artists and writers in several European capitals and the United States. - movement spread farther when expatriate members of Ball's circle in Switzerland returned to their homelands after the war. --- Richard Huelsenbeck, for instance, took Dada to Germany, where he helped found the Club Dada in Berlin in April 1918. - Dada pursued a slightly different agenda and took on different forms in each of its major centers - Berlin Dada was its use of provocative propaganda. Compared to the more literary forms of Dada elsewhere, Berlin Dada also produced an unusually large amount of visual art ---—especially collage and photomontage (photographic collage).

Helen Frankenthaler: Mountains and Sea

- outlined selected forms in charcoal and then poured several diluted colors onto the canvas. - result reminded her of the coast of Nova Scotia where she frequently went to sketch.

Daguerreotype

- produced after he annouced his new technology - an early photoghic process that makes a positive print on light -sensitized copperplate; invented and marketed in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

Eiffel Tower

- proud reminder of 19th cen Fren belief in progress and ultimate perfectibility of civilization thru science/technology - structural engineer Gustave Eiffel designed/constructed tower --- to serve as a monumental approuach to 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris (main attraction) --- 20 more internation fairs thu europe and united stated in secouned half of 19th cem --- events showcased and compared international industry, science, and the applied, decorative, and fine arts - 984 feet high tallest sstructure in wworld - intended to demonstate Frances superior engineer, technological, industrial knowlege/power - temporary structure - one of most photographed structures (1889) --- tourists to Expositopn bought souvenir photors by professional photographers ---(this photo shows rising above exibition building around and it and along the champ de mars RECTION - initial response mixed -- group of 47 artists wrote to "Le Temps" ------"useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower, a black and gigantic factory chimney." -- Gustave Eiffel "I believe the tower will have its own beauty, will show that [the French] are not simply an amusing people, but also the country of engineers." - became international symbol of advanced thought/modernity amoung artists and a public specitcle - today, sybol of paris

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother

- shows Florence Owens Thompson, a 32-year-old mother of seven representative of the poverty suffered by thousands of migrant workers in California - carefully constructed her photograph for maximum emotional impact -- zoomed in very close to the subject, focusing on the mother's worn expression and apparent resolve - comp refers to images of the Virgin Mary holding the Child Jesus ----or perhaps sorrowful scenes in which she contemplates his loss - chose to eliminate from this photograph the makeshift tent in which the family was camped, the dirty dishes on a battered trunk, trash strewn around the campsite, ----and, most significant, Thompson's teenage daughter—all documented in her other photographs of the same scene - decided to focus on the purity and moral worth, sought Federal aid; could not allude to that Thompson had been a teenage mother or even she was Cherokee - became the "poster child" of the Great Depression - demonstrating the propaganda power of the visual image.

Carl Jung/Abstract Expressionism

- some Abstract Expressionist artists were also deeply influenced by the theories of the Swiss psychoanalyst CJ - described a collective unconscious of universal archetypes shared by all humans --- many early Abstract Expressionists aspired to create works that embodied such universal symbolic forms ---- as 1940s progressed, became the symbolic content of some paintings became increasingly personal and abstract - By referring to "primitive," mythic imagery and archaic, archetypal, and primal symbolism, --some artists hoped to make a connection among all people through the collective unconscious; --- several used biomorphic forms or developed an individual symbolic language in their paintings; all made passionate and expressive statements on large canvases.

Antonio Gaudi

- spread all across europe, in spain it was called Modernismo, -- the major practitioner was the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet - Gaudí integrated natural forms into the design of buildings and parks that are still revolutionary in their dynamic freedom of line.

Art Nouveau

- swirling mass of drapery in "the walz" as a stylistic affinity with Art Nouveau (French for "new art"), --- a movement launched in the early 1890s that permeated all aspects of European design for more than a decade - embraced the use of modern industrial materials but rejected the functional aesthetic of works such as the Eiffel Tower that showcased exposed structure as architectural design. - artists and architects drew particular inspiration from nature, especially from vines, snakes, flowers, and winged insects, --- whose delicate and sinuous forms were consistent with the graceful and attenuated aesthetic principles of the movement - goal was to harmonize all aspects of design into an integrated whole, as found in nature itself.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

- the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. - focused attention on figures, producing images of middle class at leisure - when met Monet at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1862, he was already working as a figure painter - Monet encouraged to lighten pallete and paint outdoors ---- by the mid 1870s Renoir was combining a spontaneous handling of natural light with animated figural compositions

Primitivism

- the borrowing of subjects or forms, usually from non-european or prehistoric sources, by Western artists in an attempt to infuse work with expressive qualities attributed to other cultures, especially especially colonized cultures - carries modern European perceptions that Western culture is more civilized, more developed, and more complex than other cultures, which are less civilized, less developed, and simpler - exploited raw materials/labor to inrease own wealth/power - many modern artists represented cultures without caring to understand how those cultures actually functioned or how their art was used.

Édouard Manet: Olympia, Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)

- title alluding to a socially ambitious prostitute of the same name in a novel and play by Alexandre Dumas the Younger - based on venus of urbunis which he had copied in florence - his reclining nude the very antithesis of Titian's: instead of rounded, angular and flattened; Titian's colors are warm and rich, Manet's are cold and harsh;Titian's "Venus" looks coyly at the male spectator, Manet's Olympia appears indifferent; And instead of looking up at us, Olympia gazes down at us, indicating that she is in the position of power and that we are subordinate, like the black servant at the foot of the bed who brings her a bouquet of flowers. cat instead of sleeping dog. - was vilified at salon

Helen Frankenthaler

- visited Pollock's studio (1951) --- began to create a more lyrical version of Action painting that had a significant impact on later artists. - worked on floor like Pollock --- but she poured paint onto unprimed canvas in thin washes so that it soaked into the fabric rather than sitting on its surface. - described her process as starting with an aesthetic question or image, which evolved as the self-expressive act of painting took over. --- "I will sometimes start a picture feeling, What will happen if I work with three blues ... ? And very often midway through the picture I have to change the basis of the experience. Or I add and add to the canvas.... When I say gesture, my gesture, I mean what my mark is. I think there is something now that I am still working out in paint; it is a struggle for me to both discard and retain what is gestural and personal."

Casa Batllo, Barcelona, Antonio Gaudi

- wealthy industrialist Josep Batllò commissioned Gaudí to design a private residence to surpass the lavish houses of other prominent families in Barcelona - convinced his patron to retain the underlying structure of an existing building, but transform its façade and interior spaces - dreamliek fantacsy of undulating sandstone sculptures and multicolored glass and tile surfaces --- imaginatively mixing the Islamic, Gothic, and Baroque visual traditions of Barcelona- gaping lower-story windows are the source of the building's nickname, the "house of yawns," while the use of what look like giant human shinbones for upright supports led others to call it the "house of bones."- roof resembles a recumbent dragon with overlapping tiles as scales.- fanciful turret at its edge recalls the sword of St. George—patron saint of Catalunya—plunged into the back of the dragon, his legendary foe.- Gaudí's highly personal alternative to academic historicism and modern industrialization reflects his affinity with Iberian traditions as well as his concern to provide imaginative surroundings to enrich the lives of city dwellers.

Édouard Manet

- well-born Parisian - studied in the early 1850s with independent artist Thomas Couture - by early 1860s developed a strong commitment to realism and modernity (largly as a result of his friendship with Baudelaire) - submitted work to every salon -- but he did as courbed 1855 and staged his own show - made Manet the unofficial leader of a group of forward-thinking artists and writers who gathered at the Café Guerbois in the Montmartre district of Paris. --- artists who frequented: Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, all of whom would soon exhibit together as the Impressionists and follow Manet's lead in challenging academic conventions. - painted themes similar to those favoured by impressionists, bit retained dedication to potrayal of modern urban life

Braque and Picasso (cubism subsects)

---- Georges Braque, enthusiastically embraced Picasso's radical ideas—he saw in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon a potential for new visual experiments. - Picasso/Braque began a close working relationship that lasted until the latter went to war in 1914. -- together Picassos developed formal innovations by flattening pictorial space, incorporating multiple perspectives within a single picture, and fracturing form, all features that they had admired in Cézanne's late paintings. According to Braque, "We were like two mountain climbers roped together." ANALYTIC CUBISM - their paintings of 909 and 1910 initiated what is known as Analytic Cubism because of the way the artists broke objects into parts as if to analyze them - (1911 and 12) such as Picasso's Ma Jolie, began to take a somewhat different approach to the breaking up of forms, in which they did not simply fracture objects visually, but also rearranged their components --- begins to resemble the actual process of perception, during which we examine objects from various points of view and reassemble our glances into a whole object in our brain --- Except Picasso and Braque reassembled their shattered subjects not according to the process of perception, but conforming to principles of artistic composition, to communicate meaning rather than to represent observed reality -------- For example, remnants of the subject are evident throughout Picasso's Ma Jolie, it is futile to try and "put the pieces together" because Ma Jolie is not a representation of a woman, a place, or an event; it is simply a painting. - Majolie brought P/B to brink of complete abstraction, but spring 1912 pulled back and created works that suggested more discernible objects (neither artists wanted to break link with reality) --- P; no such thing as completely abstract art, because "You have to start somewhere." SYNTHETIC CUBISM - 2nd major phase because of the way the artists created complex compositions by combining and transforming individual elements, as in a chemical synthesis - also used 3d for Synthetic Cubist sculpture, such as mandolin and clarinet

Clement Greenberg/What are his thoughts on painting?

FORMALIST - an approach to the understanding, appreciation and valuation of art based almost solely on considerations of form. - approach tends to regard an artwork as independent of its time and place of making - urged the Abstract Expressionists to consider their paintings "autonomous" and completely self-referential objects - best paintings, he argued, made no reference to the outside world, but had their own internal meaning and order - described Pollock as "the most powerful painter in contemporary America." who propelled into staedowm

Impressionism

French beging of impressionist - french painters around 1870 continued to paint modern urban subjects, but their perspective differed from that of Manet and the Realists --- instead of challenging social commentary, younger artists painted pretty pictures of upper middle class at liesure in countryside and in city, although several painted rural (point on view city person on vacay) the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. - (1874) a group of these artists (including Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir) ehibited together in paris under the title the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc. (Anonymous Corporation of Artist-Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc.) - Pissarro organized the group along the lines advocated by anarchists ---such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who urged citizens to band together into self-supporting grass-roots organizations, rather than relying on state-sanctioned institutions - pissarro envissioned the Société as a mutual aid group for artists who opposed the state-funded Salons - impressionists are the most famous members today, also working several different styles - all 30 participants agreed not to submit anything that year at salon (that rejected) as a declaration of independence to ggain public attention - 7 more exibitions were held between between 1876 and 1886, membership varying slightly - relative success of these prompted pther artists to organize own alternatives to the Salon and by 1900 anindependent exhibition and gallery system had all but eradicated french acedemic Salon system - strangle hold ended

Federal Arts Program

NEW DEAL - New deal: established a series of programs to provide relief for the unemployed and to revive the nation's economy, including several initiatives to create work for American artists - 1933 Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) lasted only five months --- but supplied employment to 4,000 artists, who produced more than 15,000 works - Treasury Department established a Section of Painting and Sculpture in October 1934, --- survived until 1943, commissioning murals and sculptures for public buildings - Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), --- ran from 1935 to 1943, succeeded the PWAP and was the most important work-relief agency of the Depression era ----- by 1943 had employed > 6 million workers in programs that included, in addition to the FAP, the Federal Theater Project and the Federal Writers' Project - About 10,000 artists participated in the FAP, producing a staggering 108,000 paintings, 18,000 sculptures, 2,500 murals, and thousands of prints, photographs, and posters, --- all of which became public property - many of murals and sculptures for train stations, schools, hospitals, and post offices, survive today, but most easel painting were sold as plumbers canvas and destroyed RESETTLEMENT AGENCY (RA) AND FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION ANS PHOTOGRAPHERS - Resettlement Agency (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) hired photographers to document the effects of the Depression across the country in photographs available to this day, -- copyright-free, to any newspaper, magazine, or publisher --- To build public support for Federal assistance in rural America - FAP paid a generous average salary of about $20 a week (a salesclerk at Woolworth's earned only about $11) - NYC's painters, developed a group identity, meeting in the bars and coffeehouses of Greenwich Village to discuss art. ---- sense of community—a community that would produce the Abstract Expressionists and that allowed New York to supersede Paris as the center of the world of Modern art. - Dorothea Lange MEXICO - Mexican Revolution (1910) overthrew the 35 -year dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz --- initiated ten years of political instability - 1920, reformist president Álvaro Obregón restored political order, and the leaders of his new government (as in the U.S.S.R.) --- engaged artists in the service of the people and state - several Mexican artists received gov commissions ---- to decorate public buildings w/murals celebrating the history, life, and work of the Mexican people - painted in a naturalistic style because the new government believed that the public at large could not understand abstract art. - Diego Rivera

Primitivism/influence of African masks on Modern artists

PICASSO - works at Louvre (African) - greatly admired expressive power/formal strangeness of African masks (relatively inexpensive, he bought several and kept them in studio - didn't care to understand cultures he represented - Picassos friends shocked by new work EMIL NOLDE - seems to come both from what he saw in Paris and from the masquerades familiar to him from European carnivals (and merging Africa and Oceania masks) - transforms his African and Oceanic sources into a European nightmare full of horror and implicit violence. - gaping mouths and hollow eyes of the hideously colored and roughly drawn masks taunt viewers, appearing to advance from the picture plane into their space - also uses juxtaposition of complementaries to intensify his colors and the painting's emotionality Die Brücke - group of radical German artists came together in Dresden as Die Brücke (The Bridge), - name from passage Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883) that describes contemporary humanity's potential as a bridge to a more perfect humanity in the future. - (formed 1905) included architecture students Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt -Rottluff --- Other German/northern European artists later joined the group, which continued until 1913 - hoped that Die Brücke would be a gathering place for "all revolutionary and surging elements" who opposed Germany's "pale, overbred, and decadent" society. - drawing on work of northern predecessors such as Van Gogh and Munch - adopting traditional northern media such as woodcuts, these artists created intense, brutal, expressionistic images of alienation and anxiety --- in response to Germany's rapid and intensive urbanization - favorite motifs were natural world and nude body --- nudism growing cultural trend in Germany in those years city dwellers wanted to connect with nature - each summer, members of Die Brucke returned to nature, visiting remote areas of northern Germany, --- but in 1911 they moved to Berlin instead —perhaps preferring to imagine rather than actually live the natural life ----- images of cities, especially Berlin, are powerfully critical of urban existance

Grant Wood, American Gothic/Regionalism

Regionalists - (1930s) developed Midwestern themes - height of depression - Wood (who later taught at the University of Iowa) --- portrays an aging father standing with his unmarried daughter in front of their Gothic Revival framed house. ----Even for the time their clothes are old-fashioned - Models: Wood's dentist and his sister Nan—wearing a homemade ricrac-edged apron and their mother's cameo --- the building was modeled on a modest small-town home in Eldon, Iowa. - daughter's long, sad face echoes her father's; she is unmarried and likely to stay that way --- husbands hard to come by because many young men fled for jobs in chicago - detail homage tp Flemish Ren painters wood admired - purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago and established Wood's national fame. - picture embodied all that was good and bad about the heartland in the 1930s

Picasso: Guernica

SPANISH BOMBING - (January 1937) spanish Civil War between the Republicans and the Nationalists began to escalate -- Picasso (a Spaniard who was then living in Paris) was commissioned to make a large painting --------for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1938 Paris Exposition, a direct descendant of the nineteenth -century World's Fairs that had resulted in the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower - 1938 Spanish Pavilion was the first Spanish national pavilion at any World's Fair. - As Picasso wondering what he might create, April 26, 1937, Nationalist-supporting German bombers attacked the town of Guernica in the Basque region of Spain, killing and wounding 1,600 civilians. --- 25 bombers in three hours caused mass destruction - seemed to serve no military purpose, other than to allow Franco's Nationalist forces to terrorize, --- world's shock worsened revelation that the German commander had planned the massacre merely as a "training mission" for the German air force. ----- Horrified, Picasso now had his subject for the Fair. - On May 1, 1 million protesters marched in Paris, -- the following day Picasso made the first preliminary sketches for his visual response to this atrocity - Guernica appeared in the Spanish Pavilion --- along with other works of art supporting the Republican cause, including works by painter Joan Miró, sculptor Alexander Calder, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and others - b/c refused to allow Guernica to be shown in Spain under the regime of Nationalist leader General Franco, it hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for years, --- finally traveling to Spain for installation in the Reina Sofía in Madrid only in 1981, six years after Franco's death - Since 1985, a tapestry copy of Guernica hung in headquarters of the United Nations in New York as a powerful reminder of the brutal human cost of unrestrained warfare. GUERINICA - On May 1, 1 million protesters marched in Paris, -- the following day Picasso made the first preliminary sketches for his visual response to this atrocity - monumental history painting detailing the historic, and ignoble, events of the attack - During ten days of intensive planning he made several sketches (esquisses) to develop the composition before moving on to canvas - He worked at the painting itself (changing figures and developing themes) for another month. - black, white, and gray, the image resonates with anguish. is a scene of brutality, chaos, and suffering - freezes figures as if caught by flash of camera - Many of the subjects are clearly identifiable: - an expressionistically reconfigured head of a bull in the upper left, a screeching wounded horse in the center, broken human forms scattered across the expanse, a giant lightbulb suggesting an all-seeing eye at the top, a lamp below it, and smoke and fire visible beyond the destroyed room in which the disjointed action takes place. ---- These images have inspired a variety of interpretations. - bull and horse symbols of Nationalist and Republican forces, variously identified with one or the other - lightbulb, javelin, dagger, lamp, and bird have also been assigned specific meanings. --- Picasso, however, refused to acknowledge any particular significance to any of these seeming symbols, he claimed, is about the massacred victims of this atrocity—beyond that, its meaning remains fluid.