THAD 1 Midterm

Matu mua/In Olden Times

1892, Gauguin, Oil on Canvas In an idyllic landscape enclosed by mountains, a group of women worship Hina, goddess of the moon. In the foreground, a girl plays the flute. To the left, separated by the trunk of a tall tree that splits the composition in two like a hinge, another group dances round the idol. Gauguin left for Tahiti in 1891, hoping to find artistic inspiration among primitive peoples whose development had been untouched by Western civilisation. However, all he encountered were the vestiges of a glorious past, already doomed to extinction. Mata Mua (In Olden Times) is a hymn to the natural lifestyle Gauguin so fervently sought. Painted in bright, flat colours, and rejecting any claim to naturalism, it is also an elegy for a lost Golden Age.

Women getting into a chauffeur-driven car

1910

Alexandro Rodchenko wearing his 'prozadezbda' or 'production clothing in front of his de-installed spatial construction

1922 Rodchenko's interest in mathematical systems reflects the scientific bent of the Russian Constructivists, artists who aspired to create a radically new, radically rational art for the society that came into being with the Russian Revolution.

advertisement for Mercedes-Benz 8/38 using house by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret

1927 Germany The modernity of women

The Riace Warriors Warrior A

450 BCE Lost-wax technique Italy, Bronze Statues His body exhibits a strong contrapposto stance, with the head turned to his right. Attached elements have been lost - most likely a shield and a spear; his now-lost helmet atop his head may have been crowned by a wreath. The warrior is bearded, with applied copper detail for the lips and the nipples. Inset eyes also survive for Statue A. The hair and beard have been worked in an elaborate fashion, with exquisite curls and ringlets.

Bedroom for Linda Loos

Adolf Loos The [room] was devised as a dreamy spectacle by... Loos, in 1903 for himself and his wife, Lina. The bed, draped with a white silk sheet, appears to float over an opulent white fur rug, and white linen curtains mask the walls. The only color that is not white is the azure blue of the carpet. 1900s The white walls, the white draperies and the white angora sheepskins created a sensual and delicate fluidity; every object in the room was white. Even the closets were concealed behind pale linen drapes. This was an architecture of silence, of a sentimental and erotic approach. Its contrast with the more public living spaces attests to a method of composition that was strictly governed by the psychological status of each room.

Josephine Baker House Project

Adolf Loos, 1920s, France Adolf Loos's 1927 design of a house for Josephine Baker has never been assigned a site because it was never built. Destined to remain unbuilt, and for many years ignored by Loosian scholars, the Baker House reconceptualises fin-de-siècle Viennese cultural discourse to frame the myth of the celebrity as a modern totem. In its formal rationale and experiential richness, it is emblematic of Modernism's slowly coalescing intensities of skin, interiority, hygiene, corporeality and transparency. Uniquely inflected by the multi-layered persona of its remarkable client/muse, it is also a complex and highly charged moment in the shifting dynamics of gender, class and race relationships in the early modern era.

Muller House

Adolf Loos, 1930s, Prague Known as an innovative landmark of early modernist architecture, the Villa Müller embodies Loos' ideas of economy and functionality.The exterior displayed Loos' theory discussed in his 1908 essay, "Ornament and Crime". In the essay, Loos criticized decorated surfaces.[4] For the exterior of the Villa Müller, Loos designed a white, cubic facade. He also wanted to distinguish between the outside, where the view could be seen by the public eye, and the inside, the private spaces of those who lived there. Consequently, the interior is lavishly decorated with comfortable furniture and marble, wood, and silk surfaces. My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor, etc. ... For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces, etc. Storeys merge and spaces relate to each other

Walking Man II

Alberto Giacometti, 1960, bronze national gallery of art, bronze statue, work mainly in Paris Expressionism, Europe after the Second world war devastated, destroyed, drained of blood. People are left with all their injuries, irreparable loss, loneliness, shame and despair. And abstraction is often the only language suitable for talking about the crash. Alberto Giacometti returned to Paris after the war with several matchbooks - boxes of these sculptures over the past few years of war (1, 2, 3). Tiny human figures, faceless and fragile, almost extinct. But in the next few years they will start to grow. Giacometti was able to restore the image of the human figure in sculpture.

Oriel Window, Lacock Abbey

William Henry Fox Talbot, 1835, (1830s) salt print from a paper negative, England. Shown here in positive form, this may be the oldest extant photographic negative made in a camera. Talbot's process, unlike Daguerre's, created a translucent negative which could be used to print multiple positive copies.

Develop, Catch-Up, Even Surpass

William Kentridge, 1989, Tate London, drawings on paper, South African artist Interestingly though, Kentridge criticises the damaging effects of trying to impose a supposedly superior, colonial culture onto South Africa. The idealistic slogans run from left to right, in opposition to the figures, who seem to be going culturally backwards from right to left, towards a barren wasteland, rather than progressing forward as hoped. show the fragmentary feature of the history and comment on colonialism in a satirical way

From Photographic Views of Japan

1868, hand-colored albumen print, Felice Beato, Accordingly, the subjects Beato photographed were Japanese but the visual culture he created is inherently Western in its conceptualization and presentation. Beato's early career as a military photographer influenced his later work in Japan. He learned that viable markets were to be found wherever Westerners confronted Eastern civilizations and cultures. Following the lead of his contemporaries, particularly those working in India, Beato acquired a sense of what Westerners found attractive about Eastern culture. While most of the images he produced as a military photographer focused on war and its aftermath, he also took whatever opportunities he had before, between, and after hostilities to photograph indigenous architecture and people. The albums he compiled and sold to officers and enlisted men generally included a sampling of these scenic views and genre scenes.

House at L'Estaque

- Aug. 1908 - Georges Braque - Cubism Oil on Canvas, France It is considered either an important Proto-Cubist landscape or the first Cubist landscape. This work is one of several paintings Braque produced of the village of L'Estaque in France. It was a popular subject among artists, especially Impressionists. Paul Cézanne in particular painted many pieces depicting the area.

Assembling for a Demonstration

Alexander Rodchenko 1920 A subject with a strong social-political content rendered in a dynamic composition, this photo-image by Rodchenko well expresses the multiple constituents of artist's eye, sharp intellect and focused energy that situated him as the defining photographer of Russia's post-revolutionary avant-garde. In a Russian street, figures gather for a demonstration. They are seen from above, from a vertiginous angle, on the diagonal, and become elements in a spontaneously, yet most effectively envisioned structure. The photographer's perspective is not that of reportage; he is, rather, representing his subject as a concept as opposed to a purely factual document. Rodchenko has made a Constructivist picture that assumes a broader symbolic dimension and is also, incidentally, filled with enigmatic detail. The dark shapes that splash the street -- shadows and other random forms -- call to mind the ambiguous configurations of another, widely-published image from around this time -- Moholy-Nagy's 1929 view looking down on the Pont Transbordeur in Marseille. The present study exemplifies Rodchenko's authority in defining a heroic new language of photographic picture-making.

Portrait of the artist's mother

Alexander Rodchenko, 1920s, Black and white photograph, Russia Gelatin-silver print One of Rodchenko's first photographs, this portrait signifies a revolution on many levels. While his mother holds up one half of a pair of spectacles to help her read (a skill she acquired only at fifty), Rodchenko stands before her testing a recently purchased camera, the monocular medium of the future. Rodchenko famously cropped his negative, cutting out the walls and table to yield a dynamic, close-up view. His mother's face, furrowed in concentration, her work-worn hand, and the kerchief wrapped around her head thereby convey a heroic character without trading in sentimentality. We apprehend the resulting picture, moreover, in much the way that Rodchenko's mother puzzles over her reading. The interaction of hands and lenses has in both cases brought the world radically into focus, magnifying earthshaking changes that, for all their promise of clarity, are still difficult or impossible to comprehend A central figure in Russian Constructivism, Alexander Rodchenko rejected the established artistic conventions of self-expression and aesthetics, dedicating himself with revolutionary fervour to bringing art to the masses. Rodchenko and the Constructivists produced radically abstract paintings, concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space and emphasizing dynamic diagonal compositions. Denouncing easel painting and fine art on ideological grounds, Rodchenko joined the Productivist group in 1921, which advocated for the integration of art into everyday life; he duly focused on graphic design, producing propaganda posters and advertisements. Later in his career Rodchenko became impressed with the photomontage of the German Dadaists and began his own experiments in the medium. Arguably having producing the first ever monochromes, Rodchenko later proclaimed, "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over."

Portrait of O.M.Brik

Alexander Rodchenko, 1920s, gelatin silver print, Russia Osip Maksimovich Brik (Russian: Осип Максимович Брик) (January 16, 1888, Moscow-February 22, 1945, Moscow), Russian avant garde writer and literary critic, was one of the most important members of the Russian formalist school, though he also identified himself as one of the Futurists.

Intersecting

Anni Albers 1960s, Pictorial weaving, cotton and rayon German born in America The use of flat colour and geometric shapes is very Bauhaus style; if you were to show someone who was not aware of Anni Albers' work, they would at least be able to see it is from the Bauhaus era. There is also a sense of precision and craft in these weavings; they look like a machine would've made them but up close you can see the human touch. In 1985, Anni Albers reflected on the difference between mediums: "I find that, when the work is made with threads, it's considered a craft, when it's on paper, it's considered art." Shows such as the one at Tate Modern are challenging that notion.

Ancient Writing

Anni Albers, 1930s, cotton and rayon German-born American Anni Albers immigrated to the U.S. to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in 1933. She took a holistic approach to teaching, encouraging her students to consider weaving from first principles. She was a textile designer, weaver, writer, and printmaker who inspired a reconsideration of fabrics as an art form, both in their functional roles and as wallhangings. German interest in "primitive" art continued to grow after World War I. After the devastation of the Great War, artists and writers sought to renew their connections to handmade "primitive" art processes in opposition to what they viewed as to the destructive and alienating power of the machine. Hermann Bahr's quote from "Expressionismus," 1916, in which he called for an escape "from a 'civilisation' which is out to devour our souls," is worth reviewing because it points to the strong anti-machine sentiments that were embraced at the Bauhaus during its early years, despite the influence of De Stijl.10 Attitudes toward the machine in post-war, economically depressed Germany were mixed: the destructive potential of the machine was still painfully apparent, but the need to re-tool was an obvious necessity. Architect Adolf Behne, who, with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, was one of the founders of the group Arbeitsrat für Kunst, wrote in 1919 that Europeans must become "primitive again" in order to engage once more with "the world of experience. Importantly, hand weaving remained a vital and on-going interest at the Bauhaus throughout the entire fourteen-year period of the school's existence. Anni Albers's important contributions involved her ability to unite a geometrically abstract visual vocabulary with corresponding constructive processes, such as double and triple weaves, and also her creation of innovative weaving constructions, such as open-weaves and multi-weaves, so as to apply them to industry. She synthesized what she had learned from contemporary sources such as De Stijl, Paul Klee, and Constructivism and then applied these lessons to those she was learning from the Andean textiles. As Anni Albers put it, weaving offered 'ways to regain sensitivity towards textile surfaces: texture' which also suggests a means to regain a connectedness to a bodily and corporeal existence. Weaving, for Albers certainly, offered a way to bridge the divide between art and design, not by opting for either one in preference to the other, but in working with both in tandem - making abstract wall hangings that she saw as artworks like the paintings of Klee and Kandinsky at the same time that she was designing things for use, such as wall coverings, fabrics or rugs. Her diploma piece at the Bauhaus was a sound-proofing fabric to improve the acoustics of Hannes Meyer's auditorium for a nearby trade union school. Throughout her life she thought about the relationship between what she would later call her 'pictorial weavings' that hung on the wall and her work designing for machine production.

Red Meander

Anni Albers, 1950s, Aubusson weave with hand knotted pile, handspun wool, German-American While a student at the Bauhaus, there were few avenues for Anni Albers to pursue; women were discouraged from any pursuit that required heavy lifting. As a result, Albers not only studied weaving but conquered it, and became one of the most highly regarded textile artists of the twentieth century. Benefiting from the instruction of Paul Klee and from her marriage to Josef Albers, Anni Albers solved innumerable aesthetic and technical challenges. Red Meander revisits, but does not replicate, a design that Albers had invented years before in linen and cotton, and also one with an ancient and extensive history. On a field of orange, a boldly red rectilinear pattern wanders across the picture plane at a carefully measured pace. In a paler hue, an abbreviation of the pattern is repeated slightly offset to the right. This second, lighter configuration appears to lie underneath its brighter counterpart, creating an optical effect. The asymmetrical composition lacks a focal point and presents several visual points of entry.

The Constructor (Self-Portrait)

El Lissitzky, 1920s, Photomontage Russia The essence of New Vision photography is pointedly expressed in this picture, commonly known as 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.

are clothes modern? An Essay on Contemporary Apparel

Bernard Rudofsky, 1940s This book is a complete departure from the conventional notion that apparel is but one of the eternally puzzling phenomena of life; that it is created by forces unfathomably obscure and beyond our control; and that dress is merely distilled from the remnants of other epochs--a belief which is so dear to museum directors and fashion writers. Rejecting these ideas, the author induces the reader to think for himself rather than to swallow information. He demonstrates that our present-day dress is the perfect expression of our civilization; and less flattering evidence was seldom presented. Mr. Rudofsky reminds us that we smugly accept the stupidity of our clothes because we shy away from an insight into the problems of human work, leisure and happiness. The author mercilessly assails the superstitions and conventions by which we are bound, and clarifies the principles which should govern clothing in a modern age. Obviously, Are Clothes Modern? is no treatise on historic costume, on pattern making or merchandising. Though it digresses necessarily into historical and psychological matters, it is written for the adult reader whether he be professionally interested in present-day clothing, or merely intrigued by its social and ethical aspects. He writes about how fashion is not just about creativity but about all of human life. MoMA uses Rudofsky's exhibition as a springboard for "Items: Is Fashion Modern?" and focuses, as Rudofsky did, on the histories, manufacture, and uses of specific articles and accessories of dress, rather than on notable designers. In paying an affectionate tribute to Rudofsky and loosely borrowing his methods and approach, MoMA makes a provocative choice—because nothing about mid-century dress pleased Rudofsky, the only director of MoMA's short-lived Department of Apparel Research. Charged with being a harsh critic by the contemporary press and a disapproving scold by, apparently, his best friend, Rudofsky critiqued many aspects of fashion, including its "absurd" forms that hampered the body, its ability to signal gender and status distinctions, and the rapidity of fashion change and resulting expense and waste. "Are Clothes Modern?" was a passionate diatribe against fashion, in turns incisive and engaging, eccentric and obtuse, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, MoMA downplays much of Rudofsky's larger agenda. Doing so, however, risks discounting the particular contours of Rudofsky's claims. This fervent modernist so strongly believed that ephemeral fashion could be corralled and overruled by sense, reason, and the functionalist precepts of good design that he confidently questioned even the most unambiguously utilitarian aspect of dress: pockets. Those seemingly useful appendages, Rudofsky charged, only accommodated man's stubborn beliefs in the protective, talismanic properties of the things he carries. Rudofsky's "24 Pockets" installation appeared in an exhibition focused on menswear, a challenging topic since men's clothing had been long associated with sobriety and understatement. While Rudofsky pilloried "the follies" of women's wear with dispatch, juxtaposing artifacts with striking formal similarities across varied cultures and historic periods (comparing "primitive" tattooing with "modern" makeup, for example), Rudofsky employed diagrams to deflate perceptions that the suit was a near-perfect form. Printed on the wall was a life-sized image of a man in business attire, perfectly outfitted—a Dick Tracy-like figure with a broad-shouldered build and conventional good looks of the 1940s. He wears a Fedora hat and handles gloves with élan; a pristine handkerchief peeks from a coat pocket. An exemplar of sleek urbanity, the figure strides forward confidently, only to be interrupted by two adjacent floor-to-ceiling glass panels. The first diagrammed the pockets in successive layers of the masculine suit, and the second, the number of buttons. As MoMA explained in its press release, Rudofsky had created a "simulated X-ray examination" of the standard masculine uniform, one that picked up on "calcified" components of dress that seemed to have spread at alarming rates. Bernard Rudofsky's 1947 essay "Are Clothes Modern?" ponders the passing of fads, the ideology of luxury goods, the changeability of body taboos, and the psychic satisfaction of a chic self-portrait. The accompanying illustrations, uniformly delightful, include a juxtaposition of the patterns of traditional Marquesan tattoos with those of late-Victorian hosiery. Pages 120 and 121 boast a jazzy graphic mapping the twenty-four pockets and seventy buttons of a mid-century man fully dressed in a suit and overcoat. "What glass beads are to the savage, buttons and pockets are to the civilized," Rudofsky writes, intending no disrespect to primitive culture. On the contrary, his analysis flows from the belief that the physical constrictions of Western clothing, like the capitalist contortions required by the system of producing and consuming them, often represents the corruption of ancient desires for bodily decoration.

Dress and jacket, made from rectangular pieces of material

Claire McCardell, Diagrams indicate dimensions. Luminary clothing designer Claire McCardell (1905-1958), was known for paring function and affordability with style. Claire McCardell was one of the most influential American designers of the 20th century, best known for her sportswear and for creating simple, comfortable clothes to suit the active lifestyle of modern women. She avoided heavy understructures and superfluous decoration, instead using creative and unconventional cut and draping to create elegant lines. She was particularly fond of wrapped and tied closures, finding them more practical than the traditional (and inconvenient) back buttons and zippers commonly used on dresses in the 1930s-50s. She often used very long "spaghetti string" ties to create a graceful pleated effect at the waist, as seen here. But the subtle and unusual two-tone color scheme (reversed in the bolero for balance) make this ensemble a particularly distinctive example of its type.

Self-portrait

Claude Cahun, 1928, gelatin silver print Here, Cahun presents herself as bold, androgynous, and doubled by her mirrored-reflection. The image is lush with textures and tones: her checkerboard jacket, highlighted hair, and smooth sun-kissed skin all make the image vivid with the abundance of life. Traditionally, the inclusion of a mirror in art was used as a convenient way to expose two enticing views of a female subject or, alternatively, as a way to emphasize a woman's vanity. In this case however, the 'real' Cahun looks away from the mirror and engages with and meets the viewer's gaze. She rejects being typecast as a passive woman who is visually consumed by admiring herself. There is no sin of vanity at work here, and instead qualities of thoughtfulness, exploration, and self-assurance confront the viewer. Art historian Shelley Rice argues that "'refusing to be imprisoned in her own glass, Cahun decided to live the imaginary life within the jealously guarded walls of her own introverted mental theatre." As such, the 'false' Cahun, the one in the mirror, by virtue of the reflection, seems to look away and out of the frame, perhaps feeling a greater freedom in the world of her imagination than she does in everyday society. By nature of the angle of the reflection, Cahun in the mirror looks different to the one we see in the foreground. The closer woman has her collar raised to hide her body, whilst the reflected Cahun knowingly reveals her beautiful and erotic neck. She presents two different opposing parts of her personality - one more confident and carefree and the other coy and somehow caged - and suggests that themes of both femininity and selfhood must be considered through a multi-faceted lens. The illusion of the mirror, and of photography itself, suggests an exploration of the 'real' versus the artificial. There is a parallel to this photograph; an exact replica in composition but the woman visible is Moore rather than Cahun. Indeed it is not only a division within herself that Cahun explores, but also our reflections when compared to those of 'others'. Noting that we also know of Moore in this pose is to further emphasise the importance of her role in Cahun's career, a sure artistic collaborator rather than straightforward girlfriend.

Mbuya Mask

DRC 20th century Pende peoples Wood, pigments These masks represented a great variety of village characters, Although the performance was entertaining, it taught moral lessons and reinforced Pende religious and political principals. Pende People, Dem. Rep. of Congo- Mbuya mask- Wood, raffia cloth, fiber. The Pende have several mask forms that, while formerly used in initiation rituals, are more commonly used in village entertainments where they are suggestive of stock characters and key village roles. The downcast eyes, pointed forehead, and sharp, whitened teeth are typical.

Tina Modotti reciting poetry

Edward Weston, 1920s, platinum print, USA One of his favorite models, Modotti—who he met in 1919—was a photographer in her own right, and documented the Mexican Renaissance in the 1920s. This photographic portrait of Tina was taken a year after the move to Mexico and was part of a series; Weston took 36 negatives of Modotti reciting poetry.

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

El Lissitzky 1919-1920, Lithographic poster, Russia Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge is one of Lissitzky's earliest attempts at propagandistic art. He produced this and other politically charged work in support of the Red Army shortly after the Bolsheviks had waged their revolution of 1917. The lithograph shows a huge red triangle that pierces into a white circle, which creates the center of attention. The red wedge symbolized the revolutionaries, who were penetrating and killing the anti-Communist White Army. The white background depicts a bright future. El Lissitzky used his signature color combination of red, white and black, which reinforces the message indicated by the work's title. Also, the shapes have their symbolic significance. According to El Lissitzky and his friends, the art before 1917 was "old-fashioned" compared to new art movements called Constructivism. And this poster is a great example of this movement. Futuristic, containing new tools, new style and artists was all about moving forward. The main goal of this art was to spring Russia into the future.' El Lissitzky, Klinom krasnym bei belykh (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge), 1919, Museum of Fine Arts, BostonPAINTING OF THE WEEK El Lissitzky - Beat The Whites With The Red Wedge ByZuzanna StanskaPublished on July 22, 2018 SHARE TWEET COMMENT Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge ("Клином красным бей белых!" Klinom krasnym bey belykh!) is a 1919 lithographic Soviet propaganda poster by artist Lazar Markovich Lissitzky, better known as El Lissitzky. It is considered symbolic of the Russian Civil War in Western publications. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge is one of Lissitzky's earliest attempts at propagandistic art. He produced this and other politically charged work in support of the Red Army shortly after the Bolsheviks had waged their revolution of 1917. The lithograph shows a huge red triangle that pierces into a white circle, which creates the center of attention. The red wedge symbolized the revolutionaries, who were penetrating and killing the anti-Communist White Army. The white background depicts a bright future. El Lissitzky used his signature color combination of red, white and black, which reinforces the message indicated by the work's title. Also, the shapes have their symbolic significance. El Lissitzky Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge El Lissitzky, Klinom krasnym bei belykh (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge), 1919, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston According to El Lissitzky and his friends, the art before 1917 was "old-fashioned" compared to new art movements called Constructivism. And this poster is a great example of this movement. Futuristic, containing new tools, new style and artists was all about moving forward. The main goal of this art was to spring Russia into the future. Constructivism was more than art - it was a philosophy originated in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin but the term was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. As a positive term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Constructivism as theory and practice was derived largely from a series of debates at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow, from 1920-22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky, for his 'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Aleksei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would develop a definition of Constructivism as: "the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of an object, and tektonika, its spatial presence." Constructivism was about an entirely new approach to making objects, one which sought to abolish the traditional artistic concern with composition, and replace it with 'construction.' The movement called for a careful technical analysis of modern materials, and it was hoped that this investigation would eventually yield ideas that could be put to use in mass production, serving the ends of a modern, Communist society. But, the Russian Constructivism was in decline by the mid-1920s, partly a victim of the Bolshevik regime's increasing hostility to avant-garde art. But it would continue to be an inspiration for artists in the West, sustaining a movement called International Constructivism which flourished in Germany in the 1920s, and whose legacy endured into the 1950s. It also influenced major trends such as the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Its influence was widespread, with major effects upon architecture, sculpture, graphic design, industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.

Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla)

Diego Rivera, 1910s, oil on canvas, Mexico. In 1915, Rivera painted what many critics believe is his Cubist masterpiece: Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla). Later, he would describe it as "probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood that I have ever achieved." The elements of this outdoor still life included a serape, a sombrero, a rifle, a cartridge belt, a wooden ammunition box, and the mountains of Mexico. The central image floats in space, its planes overlapping or diminishing in surprising ways. What could be the shadow of the gun is painted white. The reds are very red, the blues are an intense luxurious blue: as they are in Mexico. The sombrero, combined with a shape that suggests an all-seeing eye, asks the viewer to look for a face; it's as elusive as a Zapatista. Clumps of trees are painted densely, viridian green spotted or scumbled over black: good cover for snipers. In the lower-right-hand corner there's an unfolded piece of blank paper, attached to the canvas by a nail, painted in a skillful trompe-l'oeil manner: it's a kind of manifesto from the millions of Mexicans who remained illiterate. Rivera continued working as a Cubist after Zapatista Landscape and made some handsome canvases, but didn't ever quite surpass this vision of distant Mexico. In that single painting, he established a valid claim to being one of the most successful of all the Cubists, not just another follower of an artistic fashion. As a result, he was now even more heavily involved in the theoretical debates in wartime Paris, all those attempts to create a mathematical basis for art, to establish rules.

The Arsenal

Diego Rivera, Mexico City, 1920s, fresco mural It is based on a Corrido, a popular type of song in Mexico written by Rivera and called "So willbe the proletarian revolution". We can see the words of the Corrido in the redband on the top. The central figure is Frida Kahlo, who became Rivera's wife. Frida hands out weapons to revolutionary soldiers in the Agrarian revolution. En el Arsenal is one of the best artworks of Diego Rivera, where he has used bold colors to portray the historical context of Mexican revolution. The painting is a part of the series, "political views of the Mexican people." The Arsenal demonstrates Diego's support in the Workers movement during that century. Diego went to great lengths to depict certain individuals and supporters in this painting. The figures in this painting are an illustration of Rivera's transferring his political beliefs onto canvas. He was an active member of the Mexican communist party

View of the Boulevard du Temple

Digital painted by Charles Leo, 1830

Portraits at the Stock Exchange

Edgar Degas, 1870s, Oil

Olympia

Edouard Manet, 1863, oil on canvas, realism, French Olympia features a nude woman reclining upon a chaise lounge, with a small black cat at her feet (image above), and a black female servant behind her brandishing a bouquet of flowers (image below). It struck viewers—who flocked to see the painting—as a great insult to the academic tradition. And of course it was. One could say that the artist had thrown down a gauntlet. The subject was modern—maybe too modern, since it failed to properly elevate the woman's nakedness to the lofty ideals of nudity found in art of antiquity —she was no goddess or mythological figure. As the art historian Eunice Lipton described it, Manet had "robbed," the art historical genre of nudes of "their mythic scaffolding..."[1] Nineteenth-century French salon painting (sometimes also called academic painting—the art advocated by the Royal Academy) was supposed to perpetually return to the classical past to retrieve and reinvent its forms and ideals, making them relevant for the present moment. In using a contemporary subject (and not Venus), Manet mocked that tradition and, moreover, dared to suggest that the classical past held no relevance for the modern industrial present. As if to underscore his rejection of the past, Manet used as his source a well-known painting in the collection of the Louvre—Venus of Urbino, a 1538 painting by the Venetian Renaissance artist Titian (image above)—and he then stripped it of meaning. To an eye trained in the classical style, Olympia was clearly no respectful homage to Titian's masterpiece; the artist offered instead an impoverished copy. In place of the seamlessly contoured voluptuous figure of Venus, set within a richly atmospheric and imaginary world, Olympia was flatly painted, poorly contoured, lacked depth, and seemed to inhabit the seamy, contemporary world of Parisian prostitution. Why, critics asked, was the figure so flat and washed out, the background so dark? Why had the artist abandoned the centuries-old practice of leading the eye towards an imagined vanishing point that would establish the fiction of a believable space for the figures to inhabit? For Manet's artistic contemporaries, however, the loose, fluid brushwork and the seeming rapidity of execution were much more than a hoax. In one stroke, the artist had dissolved classical illusionism and re-invented painting as something that spoke to its own condition of being a painted representation.

Suit

Elsa Schiaparell, Fall 1938, wool, Costume Institute. MOMA Elsa Schiaparelli was influenced by the Surrealist art scene of Paris in the 1930s, and references to that movement frequently materialize in her designs. Artists were using collage, photography and paint as their medium; Schiaparelli was using clothing. Here, in a suit from her fall 1938 Pagan collection, she incorporates three elements that have become hallmarks of her career-- interesting fabric, Surrealist elements and unconventional buttons. Schiaparelli scoured fabric houses to find fabrics that perfectly translated her artistic ideas. The crepe used for this jacket and dress is highly textured, adding a rough dimension to the overall design. The Surrealist elements here, the plastic bug ornaments, are shockingly realistic and in juxtaposition to the delicate pink silk of the collar where they rest. As Dilys Blum states in Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, many designs from this collection featured earthy decorations inspired by Botticelli's paintings, like flowers, fruits, animals and insects. Buttons were another form of expression for Schiaparelli. In this case, the leaf-shaped buttons represent foliate forms, another common motif seen throughout the Pagan collection. This unusual ensemble would require a certain level of fashion bravado, and the previous owner, Millicent Rogers, definitely possessed that. Not on view

Lucknow after the Siege

Felice Beato, 1858(1850s), albumen print, India,(Italian British born photographer)

Women using cosmetic

Felice Beato, 1860s, Hand-colored albumen print, Japan

"Photographic Views of Japan"

Felice Beato, 1860s, hand-colored albumen print, Japan,His images are remarkable not only for their quality, but also for their rarity as photographic views of Edo period Japan.

Inverted America

Joaquin Torres-Garcia, 1943, ink on paper With the southern cone turned upside down, one sees the map of South America in an entirely new way. The map communicates important details like the cardinal direction of the South, the latitude line of Montevideo, and the equatorial line. Rather than show the equator at the center of the hemisphere, as is usually the case, Torres-García instead places Uruguay in this privileged position. Other symbols like the sun, boat and fish seem relatively straightforward, however for Torres-García they also communicated greater meaning. Appearing often in his work, the sun is a powerful pre-Columbian symbol. Due to its life giving force, Torres-García prominently features it, not only in this map, but also in his Cosmic Monument (1938), where it appears at the center. The boat is usually associated with travel, while the fish represents fecundity.

Self portrait on the border between Mexico and the United States

Frida Kahlo, 1930s, oil on tin, Mexico, Frida stands on a boundary stone that marks the border between Mexico and the United States. In Self-Portrait on the Border Line a fire-spitting sun and a quarter moon are enclosed in cumulus clouds that, when they touch, create a bolt of lightning. By contrast, the single cloud over the United States is nothing but industrial smoke spewed from four chimney stacks labeled FORD. And instead of encompassing the sun and moon, the American cloud besmirches the American flag, whose artificial stars have none of the dazzle of Mexico's real sun and real moon. Whereas the Mexican side of the border has a partially ruined pre-Columbian temple, the United States has bleak skyscrapers. Whereas Mexico has a pile of rubble, a skull, and pre-Columbian fertility idols, the United States has a new factory with four chimneys that look like automatons. And whereas Mexico has exotic plants with white roots, the United States has three round machines with black electric cords. The machine nearest Frida has two cords. One connects with a Mexican lily's white roots, the other is plugged into the United States side of the border marker, which serves as Frida's pedestal. She, of course, is as motionless as a statue, which is what she pretends to be. With the high-voltage irony of her withering glance, Frida looks, once again, like a "ribbon around a bomb." Her face is poised for mischief, and, again in defiance of propriety, she holds a cigarette. She also holds a small Mexican flag, which tells us where her loyalties lie.

Wall hanging Silt Tapestry Red/Green

GUnta Stolzl, 1920s, otton, silk and linen and was designed to be a stand-alone piece. The use of red and green dyes provides a pleasant contrast and the vertical forms help to balance the composition. There are a wide- variety of curvilinear forms, checks and chevrons which add interest and elevate the status of the tapestry. This results in a piece which is dynamic and appears to have a life of its own. The piece also evokes the energetic atmosphere prevalent in the Bauhaus in this period. This hand-woven tapestry represents Stolzl's unique approach to manufacturing her textile pieces. Stripes, squares, rectangles and free-form designs are her hallmark; as is a confident use of colour.

Spirit of the Dead Watching

Gauguin, 1890s, Oil on burlap mounted on canvas Tahiti Clearly highly prized by Gauguin, the best of two years' worth of "fine" canvases, the painting depicts an adolescent girl (the model was Gauguin's Tahitian girlfriend Tehura, who was only fourteen years old), lying belly down on a bed, her face staring out at the viewer with a fearful expression. The bed is covered with a blue pareo (a wraparound skirt worn by Tahitians) and a light chrome-yellow sheet. Behind the bed, silhouetted and in profile, a woman watches over the child. Gauguin created a haunting, supernatural quality by exploiting what he considered to be the emotional potential of color. When describing the painting to Mette, he points out how the shades of purple on the wall create "a background of terror" and how the sheet "must be yellow, because, in this colour, it arouses something unexpected for the spectator." Using colors to arouse feelings was very much in line with the work of other Post-Impressionist artists, such as Gauguin's contemporary and friend, Vincent van Gogh. Aside from color, the composition is itself unsettling, particularly the relationship between the girl and the old woman behind her whose simplified form and disproportionate scale suggest Tahitian statuary or tiki. He was keen to shock the bourgeoisie and certainly his own nude in The Spirit of the Dead Watching—"a slightly indecent study" as he described it—is in many ways as radical as Manet's. The body is awkwardly positioned and disproportionate. The feet overhang the bed and the hands are larger than the feet. And most shocking of all, is the age of the model. The critic Stephen Eisenman takes a different line of argument, describing the painting as "an assault upon the tradition of the European nude." Of particular interest for Eisenman is the viewer's uncertainty regarding the sex of the figure, the large hands and narrow hips suggesting a male rather than a female form. "The posture and anatomy of Tehura, which emphasizes her boyishness, is derived from various androgynous and hermaphroditic prototypes," Eisenman argues, citing the Borghese Hermaphrodite as one of them. Seen in this light, the painting, far from being an image of patriarchal dominion over the colonized body, is instead a subversive attack on that patriarchy and all the gendered values that it maintains.

Rectangle based crepe dress

Grain-cut, hung on the bias, 1921 Madeleine Vionnet Vionnet's designs are simple and classic. Many of them were made of geometric shapes (squares, circles, triangles) of fabric draped over the body. Those that hung on the diagonal gave rise to the bias cut that characterized fashion in the 1930s. Vionnet dispensed with buttons and hooks and zip fasteners and interfacing; not only did she consider them constricting, but they also interfered with the way fabric moved. She once said: "The designer at work has a woman and some fabric, and with these two elements must create something harmonious. Until recently, we abused these two. We seemed to view women's bodies as shameful objects whose shapes had to be concealed as much as possible. As for the fabrics, we treated them like young children, incapable of managing on their own, for which all sorts of supports were essential: stays, interfacing, stiffeners. I wanted to rehabilitate these two innocents and to demonstrate that a piece of fabric falling freely over an unfettered body can still form a harmonious ensemble. I was looking for the dress that would automatically find its original shape when at rest, like a soldier stepping back into the ranks. The formula for the well-cut dress."

The stone breakers

Gustave Courbet, 1840s, oil on Canvas French Like Romanticism, Realism was a broad cultural movement in the 19th century that had its origin in literature and philosophy. In painting, its most prominent representative was Gustave Courbet. His Stonebreakers represented workers, as he had seen them, in monumental form.The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849, depicts two ordinary peasant workers. Courbet painted without any apparent sentiment; instead, he let the image of the two men, one too young for hard labor and the other too old, express the feelings of hardship and exhaustion that he was trying to portray. Courbet shows sympathy for the workers and disgust for the upper class by painting these men with a dignity all their own. Many of Courbet's paintings focus on everyday people and places in daily French life. Courbet painted these ordinary people in an attempt to portray the French people as a political entity. In this way Courbet's republicanism showed through in his work. Courbet truthfully portrayed ordinary people and places, leaving out the glamour that most French painters at that time added to their works. Because of this, Courbet became known as the leader of the Realist movement.

Blue Nude, Souvenir of Biskra

Henri Matisse, 1900s, Fauvism Matisse was working on a sculpture, Reclining Nude I, when he accidentally damaged the piece. Before repairing it, he painted it in blue against a background of palm fronds. The nude is hard and angular, both a tribute to Cézanne and to the sculpture Matisse saw in Algeria. She is also a deliberate response to nudes seen in the Paris Salon - ugly and hard rather than soft and pretty. Blue Nude is of a woman laying nude with one leg over the other and arm bent against her head. The strokes that were used while painting this piece were somewhat sketch like and you can see the process of applying paint to the canvas through this. Some of the most noticeable places that you can see this type of application is the shading on the inner side of her left breast and the dark lines around her thighs and face. This is a feature that falls into the category of avant-garde because it goes against the smooth soft lines that the academy strived for and was much more sketch like. The reason that they appreciated a more smooth finish to paintings is to give them a stronger sense of realism. This painting is very much the opposite of real. The color used to represent shadows and details on this woman are unusual and unrealistic. Along with this, some features were not portrayed in perfect detail such as her toes and fingers-again against the academy and more along the lines of avant-garde. The painting style being more sketch like and the subject not being in perfect detail is a bit unconventional as well. Another way that this painting portrays the avant-garde style is its depiction of the female nude. Rather than displaying a very stylized and soft image of a nude woman, Matisse created a much different and rougher portrayal. Her anatomy is also different than many of the nudes that we normally see. She seems to have definite muscle and this also takes away from the softness. There is a somewhat abstract feel to this piece because of the use of color along with the faint detail in the background. Many of these features fall into primitivism as well. The sketch like strokes may seem simpler and abstract background also add a simple feel to this piece. This is a characteristic of primitivism along with the abstraction that Matisse uses. Though we can guess that the background is of plants and flowers, it is hard to make out specific details and know for sure. Another feature that is more primitive is the exaggerated quality of this woman's body. She is fit and has muscle that is defined by dark blue and black lines that make them look very established. Though this is possible for women to look like, it is more common to see a softer shape.

The red studio

Henri Matisse, 1910s, oil on canvas, French "Where I got the color red—to be sure, I just don't know," Matisse once remarked. "I find that all these things . . . only become what they are to me when I see them together with the color red." This painting features a small retrospective of Matisse's recent painting, sculpture, and ceramics, displayed in his studio. The artworks appear in color and in detail, while the room's architecture and furnishings are indicated only by negative gaps in the red surface. The composition's central axis is a grandfather clock without hands—it is as if, in the oasis of the artist's studio, time were suspended. Fauvism This triumph of illusion is due in part to the linear perspective that defines the table, chairs, and the walls and floor of the studio. But look! Matisse has constructed some of the worst linear perspective ever seen. Receding lines should converge, but look at the chair on the lower right. The lines widen as they go back. And look to rear left corner of the room. The corner is defined by the edge of the pink canvas but above that painting, the line that must define the corner is missing! Matisse is literally dismantling the perspective of the room but it makes no difference, we still see the room as an inhabitable space. Illusion still triumphs.

Le Noye (Drowned Man) Self Portrait as a Drowned Man

Hippolyte Bayard, 1840, direct positive, French First instance of intentional photographic fakery. First photographic practical joke. First use of a photograph as propaganda / protest. Faint a performative suicide to protest against French Government. And, quite possibly, a result of the world's first reliable photographic process, direct positive

Are Clothes Modern?

Installation view, 1940s, MOMA. in 1944, architect bernard rudofsky curated a fashion-centric exhibition at MoMA and asked the question: 'are clothes modern?' the 111 item types are represented with supplementary photography and videos materials, culminating in an exhibit of around 350 total pieces. the exhibition fills the entire sixth floor of MoMA with an overarching examination of the last 100 years through distinct periods, focusing on their iconic fashion choices, trends, and accessories. in rudofsky's 1944 exhibition, he explored the social relationships between people and their mid-century styles. similarly, 'items: is fashion modern' explores a myriad of stylistic choices, some of which are still prominent today. examples include the little black dress, the moon boot craze, the hajib, and the bikini — spanning both time and cultures. 'a powerful form of creative and personal expression that can be approached from multiple angles of study, fashion is unquestionably also a form of design, with its pitch struck in negotiations between form and function, means and goals, automated technologies and craftsmanship, standardization and customization, universality and self-expression,' paola antonelli says. 'like all physical and digital forms of design, it moves today on a spectrum ranging from post-industrial seriality (from prêt-à-porter to fast fashion) to precious, handcrafted uniqueness (couture). as design, it exists in the service of others. in most cases, it is designed by a human being to dress others—sometimes many, many others—so that they can function in the world, in different arenas.'isitors' progression through the exhibition focuses on clusters of objects grouped together to accentuate a specific trend or fashion type. the exhibition begins with an area devoted to the concept of mutated bodies and the silhouette, which creates a strong contrast with other highlighted trends such as fashion and technology, clothing with an explicit message, athleticism in fashion, and the uniform. to conclude, the exhibition explores the theme of 'power,' eventually revealing, through a system of data visualization, the hidden connections and patterns between all 111 items. In the press release for Are Clothes Modern?, Rudofsky posits: "It is strange that dress has been generally denies the status of art, when it is actually a most happy summation of esthetic, philosophic and psychological components." The current presentation at MoMA leans toward positioning its "items" more as functional design than art, suggesting that—from this institution's perspective—garments can aspire to the status of "important design," but fashion itself still has yet to qualify as an art form. While one can speculate on this aversion, it might be more worthwhile to consider Rudofsky's impassioned stance: "While painting, sculpture and dance have very definite limitations, dress at its best not only comprises notable elements of these arts, but its sovereign expressiveness through form, color, rhythm—it has to be worn to be alive—its intimate relation to the very source and standard of all esthetic evaluations, the human body, should make it the supreme achievement among the arts." The main visual strategy was the juxtaposition of traditionally ethnographic artifacts with similar-looking consumer products. The goal of the exhibition was to immunize the public against the persuasive power of advertising and the seductive appeal of continually changing fashions, thereby challenging accepted behavior and habits.

Jacques Cazotte

J.B. Perroneau, 1760, Oil French

Sidewalk Drawings

Jacob Lawrence, 1940s, Gouache on paperAchieving success early in his career, Jacob Lawrence combined Social Realism, modern abstraction, pared down composition, and bold color to create compelling stories of African American experiences and the history of the United States. Drawing on his own life and what he witnessed in his Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Lawrence strove to communicate human struggles and aspirations that resonated with diverse viewers. Coming to artistic maturity during the waning of the Harlem Renaissance and the waxing of Abstract Expressionism, Lawrence charted a unique path, telling poignant stories of migration, war, and mental illness, among others, and would become a powerful influence for younger African American and African artists. The Harlem paintings did not refer to the war, but another painting presages his involvement in it. THe viewer looks down on two girls, with chalk in hand, who have covered the blue-gray sidewalk with large scrawls of pink and white. Many of the girls' stick figures suggest the war: at the upper right, an airplane drops bombs, to the left of it is a large American flag. A naval ship charges into the scene from the lower right with guns blasting, two stick figures on the upper deck, and an American flag after. The sophisticated composition with its bird's eye perspective and flattened space marks him as a skilled and conscious artists.

Universal Composition

Joaquin Torres-Garcia, 1930s oil on cardboard Uruguay This painting, made of primary colors and a grid with easily recognizable pictographs exemplifies his ideas about harmony and universalism. Although he frequently explored the pure, geometric abstraction of forms and colors, Torres-García did not exclude figuration, or the presence of recognizable objects, from his works. In Constructive Composition, for example, he integrated pictographs (symbols that represent an image or idea, such as a heart or boat) within a constructivist grid. Torres-García believed that this relationship between the geometric structure of the painting and its symbolic content embodied an ideal harmony within the universe. He called this theory Constructive Universalism. In some of his paintings, he used the special properties of the golden ratio (see sidebar) to achieve an even greater feeling of integration with nature and the cosmos. To more perfectly express these universal relationships, Torres-García limited his palette to the most basic and pure colors - red, yellow, and blue (the primary colors), and white and black. Constructive Universalism sought to combine the "reason" of geometry (Constructivism) with the spiritual "intuition" of man and nature (Universalism). The term "Constructivism" refers to a European tradition of abstract art based on geometric elements - lines, squares, planes - and characterized by simplicity and precision. Torres-García evoked the "universal" to describe organic sources of abstract art found in ancient (American) civilizations. Constructive Universalism, as he referred to this new style, sought to imbue geometric art with a new spiritual dimension, here achieved through the appropriation of ancient symbols.

Indoamerica

Joaquin Torres-Garcia, 1940s, oil on leather Uruguay Torres-García upended traditional hierarchical structures by defining the art of South America on its own terms, rather than in relation to that of the North (i.e. the United States and Europe) as it had been in the past. In proclaiming itself independent from artistic centers of power like New York and Paris, Torres-García looked to the pre-Columbian past (before the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492) as a source of artistic inspiration. Inverted map of South America

Cortes and Malinche

Jose Clemente Orozco, 1920s, fresco, Mexico City, in a school In this fresco Cortés and Malinche are starkly nude, carnal yet akin to Adam and Eve, sitting over the figure of a prostate, perhaps degenerate, Mexico, the product of miscegenation, the mixing of races. With his arm across her, it is not clear whether Cortés is restraining her or protecting her. It is clear that Malinche is being portrayed here as the mother of modern Mexico. The contrast between the whiteness of Cortés and the brown skin of Malinche and the one they are sitting over is deliberate. The central image depicts the power Cortez had during the conquest of the Aztecs. Cortez's character overall is painted as someone who is perfect, almost as if it was fictional, with his white skin, sharp face structure, and strongly built body. Cortez asserts his power by holding the hand of the most infamous indigenous woman- "La Malinche," who is painted more realistically with her brown skin and smaller figure- with his right hand, which can signify their alliance. His right foot stands above the unknown weak indigenous man on the floor, showing that he is stronger than the indigenous, all which is done while La Malinche stares down unhappily at the body. His left arm and leg extend over La Malinche's body to show that he is ruling, killing, and stopping the La Malinche from taking action. Cortes's body language shows that he is more open and confident, while La Malinche has more of a closed position. It is shown through her expression that she recognizes the real harm that her controversial partnership with Cortes has caused to the indigenous.

Interaction of Color

Joseph Albers, USA, 1960 The illustrations are studies composed of color-printed paper and mounted colored paper, some with cutouts. Interaction of Color (public library), with its illuminating visual exercises and mind-bending optical illusions, remains an indispensable blueprint to the art of seeing. Practical exercises demonstrate through color deception (illusion) the relativity and instability of color. And experience teaches that in visual perception there is a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect. What counts here — first and last — is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision — seeing. By the early twentieth century, the study of various wheels and globes was absorbed into art school training, including the Bauhaus, based on the idea that knowledge of the inherent order of color would benefit the artist.In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is—as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually. To this end, the beginning is not a study of color systems. In place of systems, Albers developed an "experimental way of studying color and teaching color," a method based on the idea that only by observing color in the push and tug and pull of context can one begin to understand the nature of color. His color course, which he inaugurated at Black Mountain College, comprised a sequence of simple exercises, each of which isolated some aspect of color interaction so as to observe that interaction carefully.

View from the Window at Le Gras

Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1826) 1820s, heliograph, French It can be considered as the world's first photographic image of a real scene. Niépce captured the photo with a camera obscura focused onto a sheet of 20 × 25 cm oil-treated bitumen. He put a metal plate covered with a chemical called bitumen into a camera box. The bitumen got hard on the parts of the plate exposed to the sun. When the plate was washed, a permanent picture remained.

How to suffer politely

Kamila Janan Rasheed 2010s, United States Blending satire and the structure of etiquette guides, this series of public aphoristic large format digital prints explore how suffering, anger, and responses to trauma are policed to ensure that said expressions of suffering do not disrupt or declare accountable oppressive systems. This series examines the choreography and performance of the "angelic negro" who in the face of routinized Black death must display superhuman restraint in repressing anger. This compulsory affective labor of smiling through the pain and performing calculated emotional acrobatics so as not to make others uncomfortable persists as a way to maintain social order. This large-scale public work seeks to make explicit the implicit scripts and norms that make confronting the nuances of oppression "impolite". How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette) both invokes and satirizes traditional etiquette guides. Created in direct response to the escalating visibility of violence against Black people across the United States, the work examines the resulting expectations placed on these communities to find ways to police their reactions while maintaining restraint and civility. More broadly, the work asks its viewers to consider how such self-monitoring of everything from emotional expression to physical movement is used as a tool to perpetuate the social order of oppressive systems. Previously exhibited across the USA, in the UK and in Zimbabwe, each time it is presented the project resonates with the specific social, political and economic conditions of Black communities in those particular locales. In Vancouver, How To Suffer Politely asks viewers to scrutinize our own city's history of racialized violence towards its Black communities, its erasures of Black visibility and over-simplified narratives about such displacement that continues to this day.

AEG Arc Lamp for Factory Illumination

Peter Behrens, poster,1910 AEG's introduction of design to industrial production heralded a new age of capitalism. It also created a new role for the artist within the industrial marketplace. According to Behrens, the role of the artist was to give form to the culture in which he lived. In the age of industry and modernization, therefore, the artist was not to replicate historical models and age-old forms, but was to create designs that expressed the spirit and rhythm of the moment. Still, good design was never to sacrifice aesthetics in favor of functionality. This was also the case in architecture. In designing highly functional factory buildings for AEG in Berlin, Peter Behrens chose not to emphasize pure functionalism. Rather, he sought to contextualize his modern constructions within the ever-evolving political and social milieu of early-twentieth-century Europe. Behrens' first assignment for AEG involved the re-design of arc lamps—utilitarian hanging lamps intended for factories, warehouses, railway stations, and other public buildings.He made the lamp's joints as few as possible, streamlined their moldings and contours, and adjusted their overall sculptural properties and proportions according to artistic principles.

Suprematist Composition: Red Square: Peasant Woman

Kasimir Malevich, 1910s, Russia, Oil on Canvas When Kazimir Malevich created the 'Red Square', he envisioned his creation as an abandoning of all materialism. The painting is a representation of simplicity in its purest form with a red quadrilateral on a white field. While the colour evokes traditional religious icon paintings found in Russia, the style is a complete abstraction. Originally known as Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions, it is left to the viewer to make the connection between the concept and the image. The art world embraced the Red Square as a key starting point for the Constructivism movement, although the painting was criticised by contemporaries when it was first created. Malevich saw the painting as a representation of his ability to go further into the unknown of life and his spiritual feelings. By delving into life's unknown, the artist believed that a transformation can take place. Created in 1915, Malevich's 'Red Square' recalls works by other abstract painters, including Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky was another leading painter and art theorist known for his purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, he lived in Germany and France. Both artists embraced themes related to religion and spirituality as well as the examination of our inner thoughts and consciousness. Malevich goes further than just creating representations with his painting. He focused on creating symbols with his paintings. He also effectively contrasts colours, such as the active feeling of red with the passiveness of white in the 'Red Square'. Malevich believed both colours represented all colours of the spectrum, and by using both he was showcasing all colour. By comparison, Kandinsky's works often features a kaleidoscope of shapes and colours.

Cover of the Bauhaus book Painting, photography, and Film

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1925 Moholy-Nagy's own book in the series, Malerei Photographie Film (Painting Photography Film) (1925), was itself a clear expression of these principles. Rejecting what he called the "monotonous gray" of conventional books, he proceeded to break up the text using bold lines, juxtaposing blocks of type with photographic images, and deploying what he saw as fundamental typographical elements: lines, rules, circles, squares, crosses, etc. Conceiving of the double-page spread as a field of abstract design innovation that could also guide and shape the reader's understanding, he moved confidently into the realm of information management, shaping meaning as much by form, placement, and contrast, as by semantics or textual comprehension. These were the views that informed Jan Tschichold's landmark book Die Neue Typhographie (The New Typography) (1928), a primer that rendered many of Moholy-Nagy's ideas sensible and practical to the working graphic designer. But Moholy-Nagy was already thinking beyond graphic design itself. For him, the process of design was part of a new way of perceiving and interpreting the world. In short, he was working toward "The New Vision," a mode of seeing and responding to our environment in the light of modern experience. In particular, he was drawn to photography in all its aspects as the medium of modernity; photograms, photomontages, film, and the dynamic combination of text and photography that he named "typophoto." This new medium of visual and textual manipulation opened up possibilities for advertising posters like Pneumatik (Tire) of 1925, and book covers like his own Painting Photography Film, that seemed to float in a realm of indeterminate space. Photo-sensitive paper in this context could be manipulated and exposed in ways that were both fun and startlingly revealing. This led to the Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books series), launched in 1925 in association with the Munich publisher Albert Langen.From a design perspective, however, the series represents one of the first coherent examples of modern book design, embracing layout, typography, bindings, and cover design. Moholy-Nagy had already identified typography as one of the key agents in shaping a modern sensibility among the mass of the public. As he wrote in 1925, "The typographical process is based on the effectiveness of visual relationships. Every age has its own visual forms and, accordingly, its own typography; and the latter, being a visual form, has to take account of the complex psycho-physical effects upon our organ of vision; the eye."

View of the Boulevard du Temple

Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, Paris, 1838, (1830s),daguerreotype, one of the earliest daguerrotype produced, widely considered the first photograph to include an image of people. The exposure time of about ten minuted only allow two people keeping still to be captured and the busy people and rose traffic were not captured.

Ambroise Vollard

Picasso, 1910s, French, Oil on Canvas Ambroise Vollard (1867-1939) was one of the great art dealers of the 20th century. He championed Paul Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Gauguin and Henri Matisse. He promoted Picasso's blue and rose periods, but he was careful about cubism. When Picasso later returned to a figuration informed by cubist richness and surrealist eroticism, they collaborated on one of Picasso's greatest achievements: his lubricious, mytho-erotic Vollard Suite, 100 engraved plates completed in 1937, culminating in emotional portraits of Vollard, who was to die two years later in a car crash. In Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, Vollard's downcast eyes, apparently closed, the massive explosion of his bald head, multiplying itself up the painting like an egg being broken open, his bulbous nose and the dark triangle of his beard are the first things the eye latches on to. They are recognisable. At least that's the way your mind, through habit, composes the details into information.

Indigenous woman

Martine Gutierrez, 2010s, photographic series in self-published magazine, USA Martine Gutierrez's photographs and videos explore gender, race, class, and sexuality, as well as conventional ideals of beauty and identity as a social construct. Her most ambitious project to date, Indigenous Woman, 2018, is a glossy, 146-page publication that closely mirrors Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in form and production. Here, Gutierrez assumes the role of editor, writer, model, designer, ad executive, and photographer, with fictional advertising and high-fashion spreads where the artist continually reinvents herself throughout its pages.

The Sphinx at Giza

Maxime Du Camp, 1849, salt print, Egypt, Tourism Du Camp was the best known and most widely documented photographer in the near East of his time. Du Camp learned photography from Gustave Le Gray before embarking for Egypt. Alexis de Lagrange, in Egypt on his way to India, taught him the new Blanquart-Evrard process. The result was some 200 negatives, 125 reproduced in the album Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie by Gide et Baudry with photographs printed by Banquart-Evrard. This album remained his only photographic work.

Procession

Nicole Elsenmann, 2019, Whitney Museum, NYC, similar to "Walking Man II", cement base

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso, 1900s, oil on canvas Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. It depicts five naked women with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly upturned tabletop. Picasso unveiled the monumental painting in his Paris studio after months of revision. The Avignon of the work's title is a reference to a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel. In Picasso's preparatory studies for the work, the figure at the left was a man, but the artist eliminated this anecdotal detail in the final painting. "Les Demoiselles" is revolutionary is the artist's omission of perspective. There is no vanishing point, nowhere for the eye to move beyond the women and their pointed glances. 6. By reducing his figures to a combination of geometric shapes, Picasso runs counter to centuries of artistic tradition in which the human form is deified, anatomically duplicated and/or romanticized. 7. The masks in the painting reflect Picasso's obsession with primitive art, not only of African origin but also the art of ancient Iberia, or modern-day Spain and Portugal. The simple forms, angular planes and bold shapes used in primitive art were instrumental in the artist's restructuring of artistic conventions.

Welcome Wall

Pascale Marthine Tayou, installation for opening of Musee de I'Homme, Paris, 2015

Mont Sainte-Victoire

Paul Cezanne. 1902-1904. Oil on canvas In this work, Cézanne divides his composition into three roughly equal horizontal sections, which extend across the three-foot wide canvas. Our viewpoint is elevated. Closest to us lies a band of foliage and houses; next, rough patches of yellow ochre, emerald, and viridian green suggest the patchwork of an expansive plain and extend the foreground's color scheme into the middleground; and above, in contrasting blues, violets and greys, we see the "craggy mountain" surrounded by sky. The blues seen in this section also accent the rest of the work while, conversely, touches of green enliven the sky and mountain. Cézanne evokes a deep, panoramic scene and the atmosphere that fills and unifies this space. But it is absolutely characteristic of his art that we also remain acutely aware of the painting as a fairly rough, if deftly, worked surface. Flatness coexists with depth and we find ourselves caught between these two poles—now more aware of one, now the other. The mountainous landscape is both within our reach, yet far away.

Why Are You Angry? No te aha oe riri

Paul Gauguin, 1890s, French/Tahiti, Oil on Canvas, He based Why Are You Angry? on an earlier Tahitian composition but changed the mood of the painting: here the principal figures are larger and disengaged from one another, their postures and characters more difficult to interpret. The interrogative title encourages the viewer to seek some sort of narrative, but the imagery resists a definitive reading. Why Are You Angry? is one of what is known as Gauguin's Tahitian paintings. Gauguin was fascinated by Tahiti and he visited it many times. During and after each of his visits, he painted artworks that depicted life in the country. He felt Impressionism had become too imitative and lacked symbolism and depth, and he admired the symbolism and vigor of African and Asian art. His quest brought him to Tahiti in 1891.

The Yellow Christ

Paul Gauguin. 1880s. Oil on canvas. Gauguin said he chose yellow to convey how he felt about the isolated life and piety of the peasants, several of whom are pictured here dressed in their distinctive regional costume and kneeling at the foot of the cross during the evening hour of Angelus—a Catholic prayer recited daily at 6 am, noon, and 6 pm. The simplicity and primitive directness of the region's peasants greatly appealed to Gauguin, who made his famous protest against Western sophistication by exiling himself to the South Seas not long after completing this painting. This depiction of the male artist as a superior being is a way of showing that he is an independent and courageous artist, and yet, he is still struggling against the public that is not very accepting of the avant-garde art. This has been seen as a work of a modern male artist which critics and other artists have called avant-garde. Construced of flat planes, intense colors, and bold circumscribing outlines, the yellow Christ is in many ways the apogee of Gauguin's early "synthetist" style. The plane of the canvas the surface which must be respected is held by the foreground figure, the strong upright of the crucifix, and the terminating horizontal bar. Against the repeated bands of field and sky and cross, the swinging curves of the women and the trees (closed forms that contrast with the movement of the straight lines) play a graceful counterpoint, the whole drawn together by a bright and simple pattern. The colors are gay, but the starkness of the Breton landscape is conveyed; the women are gentle but their peasant force is still evident. The uniform color surfaces, the lines that ring the figures are deliberately crude and simplified, at the opposite pole from Impressionism. Yet Gauguin has observed with care: the costumes are accurate, the light is the cold light of Brittany, the field contains harmonies of green, rust, and yellow. And we know besides that the figure on the cross is closely derived from a Crucifixion in the church of Tremalo not far from Pont-Aven. But the artist has gone beyond naturalistic observation to emotional expression. "The Impressionists," he wrote later in his Intimate Journals, "study color exclusively, but without freedom, always shackled by the need of probability. For them the ideal landscape, created from many entities does not exist. . . . They heed only the eye, and neglect the mysterious centers of thought, so falling into merely scientific reasoning." It is this ideal expression that is Gauguin's goal. Sophisticated painter, traveler, and man from the capital though he may be, and no peasant (indeed because he is all these) he wants his canvas to convey, because it contains, the "great rustic and superstitious simplicity" he found among the Breton people. And so be has simplified the construction of his picture, flattened its space, coarsened its outlines, and heightened its colors, to make it no longer merely an objective record set down by an external observer, but the direct, visual symbol of a naive and trusting religious faith.

AEG Turbine Factory

Peter Behrens Berlin, Germany 1910s Behrens saw the Turbine Factory as a symbol of modernism, and its attributes of speed, noise and power. He wanted to make the interior and exterior as simple as possible, and in collaboration with the engineers chose to use fewer, but more massive girder frames than was commonly employed in such a large building. The AEG Turbine Factory was to be a temple dedicated to a new age of production. The classicism evoked in its reinforced concrete, pedimented façade was not of bygone traditions, but a new classicism that expressed the industrial advances that were reshaping contemporary life.It was unprecedented because it served as a cultural icon of modern industrial power. It expanded the realm of the architect's work and established new guidelines for mass-production. AEG was one of the first major manufacturers to develop a label as a means to distinguish their products from those of their competitors. Beyond this, AEG was the first firm to invest in the art of industrial design. It wanted to sell not only the best-functioning kettles, but also the most streamlined, aesthetically pleasing kettles. AEG changed the nature of mass-production not only in its decision to hire talented artists like Behrens, but also its immense size and ever-increasing economic power. AEG's introduction of design to industrial production heralded a new age of capitalism. It also created a new role for the artist within the industrial marketplace.

Composition with Red, Blue, Black, yellow and gray

Piet Mondrian, 1920s, oil on canvas, Dutch In the 1920s, Mondrian began to create the definitive abstract paintings for which he is best known. He limited his palette to white, black, gray, and the three primary colors, with the composition constructed from thick, black horizontal and vertical lines that delineated the outlines of the various rectangles of color or reserve. The simplification of the pictorial elements was essential for Mondrian's creation of a new abstract art, distinct from Cubism and Futurism. The assorted blocks of color and lines of differing width create rhythms that ebb and flow across the surface of the canvas, echoing the varied rhythm of modern life. The composition is asymmetrical, as in all of his mature paintings, with one large dominant block of color, here red, balanced by distribution of the smaller blocks of yellow, blue gray, and white around it. This style has been quoted by many artists and designers in all aspects of culture since the 1920s.

Villa Savoye

Poissy, France. Le Corbusier (architect). 1929 C.E. Steel and reinforced concrete This was a radically new view of the domestic sphere, one that is evident in his design for the Villa Savoye. The architect has created a space that is dynamic. This design concept was based on the notion of the car as the ultimate machine and the idea that the approach up to and through the house carried ceremonial significance. A machine to live in.

Capitoline Venus

Rome 200ce Sculpture, ,marble The sculpture, of slightly larger than life size dimensions, was found near Basilica of San Vitale around 1666-1670. It is made of precious marble (probably Parian), and represents Venus-Aphrodite nude and in contemplation, coming out of her bath. She is depicted with her arms following the curving contours of her soft and fleshy small-boned body and covering her breasts and pubc area. The right leg is forward and bent, and left is resting. The head is slightly tilted towards the left. The hairstyle is complicated. Part of the hair is pulled up, in the form of hoops, at the top of her head and tied to form a bow. Others locks touch her shoulders. The expression of the face seems absent, psychologically depicted by the small, languid eyes and the small, fleshy mouth.

Why Are You Angry

Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, 2010s, Film, projection, Britain Taking its title from one of Paul Gauguin's (1848-1903) late paintings made in Tahiti, No te aha oe riri (Why Are You Angry?) 1896 (Art Institute of Chicago), Nashashibi / Skaer's film follows Gauguin's voyage to Tahiti. As a contemporary exploration of the established narratives that surround Gauguin and his time in French Polynesia, the film also functions as a reclamation of the exoticised woman and asks fundamental questions about representations of women, colonised lands and the power of myth. The film was first shown in Athens as part of documenta 14 2017 and then at Tate Modern, London in September 2017. Created nearly eight years later, Why Are You Angry? extends the duo's interest in the role of artists in the construction of history. The film moves between choreographed and informal footage of different Tahitian women dancing in front of their homes, going to work, to the supermarket, swimming at a waterfall, driving in their cars, and re-enacting recognisable tableaux from Gauguin's paintings. Thus, as well as its title, the film borrows both locations and poses directly from Gauguin, in order to examine the problems and potentials of re-imagining women through his particular gaze. Seeking to reclaim his fetishised subjects through the artists' own female gazes, the film flickers between moments of great beauty - a beach or waterfall scene, or scenes in which the women are relaxed, dancing, talking and singing - and moments of knowing and deliberate discomfort, in which they appear nude and posed to resemble a particular work by Gauguin, visibly vulnerable and frustrated. In this way, the film directly addresses the difference between a filmic gaze in which time passes, the agitation of the subject is notable and the audience - and artists - are implicated by their own gaze, and a painterly gaze in which time is seemingly captured as a single moment and the subject of a painting can read as an object.

Anthropophagy

Tarsila do Amaral, 1920s, Oil on canvas Tarsila delves further into the sexual and political dynamics of the metaphor in the sensitive interplay of two abstracted bodies, a male and female, placed in a stylised tropical landscape illuminated by a lemon-slice sun.

Favela Hill

Tarsila do Amaral, 1920s, Oil on canvas In seeking to reclaim Brazil's history, Tarsila depicted a favela, one of the communities populated by the country's poorest citizens, which began to crop up in the hills surrounding Rio de Janeiro and other major cities starting the in the late 19th century. By the 1920s, the favelas were occupied predominantly by those of African descent, which kept their experience tied to the history of slavery—abolished in Brazil in 1888. In visiting the favelas, Tarsila and her companions explored their rich music and culture, immersing themselves in Brazil's colonial history as well as its African heritage.

Abaporu

Tarsila do Amaral, 1928, oil on canvas Brazil Tarsila, as she is known in Brazil, was one of the foremost painters of Brazil's modernist movement in the first half of the twentieth century. She is best known for her innovative paintings of the 1920s, when she was actively engaged in the development of the new visual language of Brazilian modernism. With the famous phrase "Tupi or not tupi, that is the question," de Andrade opens his Cannibalist Manifesto making a reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet while asking a question about Brazilian cultural identity. The Tupi were one of the largest Amerindian groups in pre-colonial Brazil, encompassing many tribes that lived along the region's Atlantic coast. Some Tupi tribes may have practiced ceremonial sacrifices and anthropophagy—practices that aroused the fascination of early European explorers like the Dutch. The figure's sinuous body is outlined in a darker brown color that becomes lighter towards the center. Tarsila highlights the middle of the right arm and foot with paint that is much lighter than at the edges. But while Léger applied this technique to create volumetric figures in contrast to gridded backgrounds that recall modern interiors, Cannibalism functions as a powerful metaphor of cultural ingestion. Having feasted on the aesthetic cues of Western art history, from Dürer to Manet, Cézanne and Gauguin, in Abaporu (1928) Tarsila converges on something both elementally Brazilian and mythical: a distillation of the country's indigenous inheritance in the supple figure rooted beside a great cactus and crowned by the sun. The work's name was drawn from the Tupi-Guarani Indian language meaning 'aba' (a person) and 'poru' (who eats human flesh). In this singular composition we find the genesis of Brazilian modernism, even before it inspired and was used to illustrate the 'Manifesto antropófago' (Manifesto of Anthropophagy) written in 1928 by Tarsila's husband, Oswald de Andrade. Anthropophagy, in the definition provided by curator Luis Pérez-Oramas in the exhibition catalogue, 'manifests a longing to devour an object of desire with which we identify' - and for this longing Tarsila provided the seminal iconography. The Cannibalist Manifesto presented a strategy for producing artworks that was both culturally authentic to Brazil and engaged with these broader international narratives of modernity.

Workers, Mexico

Tina Modotti, 1926-1930 Gelatin silver print Tina Modotti's photographs blend formal rigor with social awareness. The Italian-born artist immigrated to the United States when she was 16. With her camera, Modotti captured Mexico's sights and people. She took its folk art and landscapes as the starting points for her most abstract images. From 1925 on, Modotti was active in leftist politics. Her pivotal 1926 photograph Workers Parade reflects her concern for class solidarity among Mexican workers. After joining the Communist Party in 1927, she made images such as Mexican Sombrero with Hammer and Sickle, symbolizing communist ideology and marrying formal elegance with highly charged political content. She collaborated with working-class people to create photographs intended to enhance their class consciousness and convey their dignity and worth. Her most famous images captured the milieu of Mexico City between World War I and World War II, including portraits of artists and intellectuals such as Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. The faces are blurred, it seems that they are represented as a group rather than individual.

Fagus Factory

Walter Gropius & Adolf Meyer Germany,1910 Both have corners free of supports, and glass surfaces between piers that cover the whole height of the building. However, in the Turbine factory the corners are covered by heavy elements that slant inside. The glass surfaces also slant inside and are recessed in relation to the piers. The load-bearing elements are attenuated and the building has an image of stability and monumentality. In Fagus exactly the opposite happens; the corners are left open and the piers are recessed leaving the glass surface to the front. Overall, Werner's intended layout for the individual buildings within the complex was carried out; greater uniformity and coherence were achieved, however, through Gropius and Meyer's reductionism in form, material, and color.

Diagram for the structure of teaching at the Bauhaus

Walter Gropius, 1920s, The individual elements of the Bauhaus teachings are inscribed in a circular shape. The areas of the preliminary course and building are conspicuously delineated from the core of the instruction-the workshops with their accompanying subjects-by a drawn double ring. This is due to the special position that both of these teaching areas occupied: In order to even be accepted to the study programme at the Bauhaus, it was necessary to successfully complete the preliminary course. And only the most talented students could qualify for participation in the building theory course. The schema also indicates the length of the respective educational units.":

Bauhaus Building

Walter Gropius, 1920s, Dessau, Germany The building was designed by the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and commissioned by the city of Dessau. The plans were drafted in Gropius's private office - the Bauhaus did not have its own department of architecture until 1927. The interior fittings were made in the Bauhaus workshops. The city of Dessau financed the project and also provided the building plot. The design is a further development of an idea that Gropius had previously realised (pre-WWI) with the construction of the Fagus factory in Ahlfeld an der Leine. In both buildings a glass facade on the load-bearing framework allows a view of the interior workings. In the workshop wing in Dessau this provides clear view of the constructive elements. The design does not visually amplify the corners of the building, which creates an impression of transparency. Gropius designed the various sections of the building differently, separating them consistently according to function. He positioned the wings asymmetrically; the form of the complex can thus be grasped only by moving around the building. There is no central view.