American Art History

Alexander Calder

(1898-1976) He was fascinated by motion and invented mobiles--delicately balanced sculpture with movable parts set in motion by air currents

Romare Bearden

(1911-1988) Influenced by Cubism; best known for photocollages that depict aspects of African American experience

Fauvism

1905,Paris. Short-lived movement concerned with the liberation of color and the formal structure of a work of art. Fauve is a title which means "wild beast." Very Chromatic

Futurism

1910.A movement in modern art that grew out of cubism. Artists used implied motion by shifting planes and having multiple viewpoints of the subject. They strived to show mechanical as well as natural motion and speed. The beginning of the machine age is what inspired these artists.

Pop Art

1950. A style of painting and sculpture in the 1950's and 1960's; the subject matter was based on visual cliches, subject matter and impersonal style of popular mass media imagery. Andy Warhol and Claus Oldenburg were two of the important pop artists.

Chromatic Abstraction

A kind of Abstract Expressionism that focused on the emotional resonance of color.

Abstract Expressionism

A painting movement that involved the expression of feelings and states of mind through abstract means, first coming together in New York City in the 1940s.

Claes Oldenburg

A pop artist who produced soft sculptures of gigantic everyday objects made of canvas and vinyl such as food, toilets and mixers.

Cubism

A style of art in which the subject matter is portrayed by geometric forms, especially cubes

Edward Hopper

A twentieth-century American artist whose stark, precisely realistic paintings often convey a mood of solitude and isolation within common-place urban settings. Among his best-known forks are Early Sunday Morning and Nighthawks.

Hans Hofmann

Abstract Expressionist. He used aspects of all these styles to create his own personal style. Has patents in radar and computer technology. German Born

Lee Krasner

Abstract-Expressionism, Abstract work that predates Pollock's work. Later married Jackson Pollock. Created collages

Avant Garde

Ahead of the times, especially in the arts

Georgia O'Keeffe

American artist that painted flowers and landscapes during the great depression.

Diane Arbus

American photographer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers) people whose normality seems ugly or surreal. , "Kid with Toy Hand Grenade", she pictures people on the fringe of society, making them look not normal. She's the pioneer of a new documentary style. "Somebody else's tragedy isn't the same as yours"

Andy Warhol

An American commercial illustrator and artist famous for his Campbell's soup painting. He was the founder of the pop-art movement, which like all other art movements in history reflected something back on the present society.

Surrealism

An artistic movement that displayed vivid dream worlds and fantastic unreal images

Impressionism

An artistic movement that sought to capture a momentary feel, or impression, of the piece they were drawing

Realsim

Artistic representation that aims to present life accurately, objectively, andhonestly, without sentimnetality or idealism

Alfred Maurer

Avant GardeWoman with Pink Bow (Unattractive woman, messed up hair, appears to be wearing pajamas with a pink bow on chest)

Philip Guston

City Limits, Neo-Expressionism. Cruising around the city looking for trouble. Generalized evil, intended to be self portraits, about him doing nothing to stop evil.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright

Co-Founder of synchronism, painted many abstract works. Had an exhibition called "The exhibition of modern artists"

Max Weber

Cubist painter who did certain abstract portrait works. Was not popular among his peers and is most known for his work with paintings of jewish heritage

Jacob Lawrence

His paintings used flattened figural shapes and bright contrasting colors to depict scenes related to the experience of African Americans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Barnett Newman

Known for his abstract expressionist works that were created with blocks of color and vertical lines, that he referred to as zips.

Charles Demuth

Major figure of precisionism; experimented with abstract lines of force; "posters" related to some of the Dada symbolic portraits; did "The Figure 5 in Gold"

Joseph Stella

Painter of the "The Brooklyn Brigde: Variations on an Old Theme" painting. He made it in 1939 and it was to show how far American has come to become a beautiful place.

Robert Indiana

Pop Artist who used stencils originally used to make commercial signs. Painted the famous "HOPE" of barack obama and has designed many stamps

Maya Lin

United States sculptor and architect whose public works include the memorial to veterans of the Vietnam War in Washington (born in 1959)

Abstraction

a general concept formed by extracting common features from specific examples

Willem de Kooning

a gestural abstractionist used slashing brush strokes and agitated application of pigment. Often he would scrape off the pigment and begin again.

Andrew Wyeth

a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. Christina's World::: depicts a woman lying on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at and crawling towards a gray house on the horizon.

Minimalism

an art movement in sculpture and painting that began in the 1950s and emphasized extreme simplification of form and color

Regionalism

an element in literature that conveys a realistic portrayal of a specific geographical locale, using the locale and its influences as a major part of the plot

Margaret Bourke

coined the term "photojournalism" and was a famous photographer and uncovered the artistic possibilities of industrial photography

Clyfford Still

foremost "color field" painters; Large areas of color in jagged forms with a thick, expressive impasto

Stuart Davis

influenced by Stieglitz and the 1913 Armory Show; thought abstract works should be more American; work was like jazz, syncopated but still landscape

Cindy Sherman

is a feminist artist who addresses the way Western art has presented women for the "male gaze" by her self-portraits in photography. She sees gender as a socially constructed concept and an unstable one.

Jackson Pollack

painter who spontaneously dripped paint on a canvas which was known to be the essence of America

Synchromism

paintings filled with swirling, colorful shapes, that were softly painted and modeled.

Mark di Suvero

used modern abstraction, movement and balance in his works. Large sculptures that are ment to be open to interpretation

Helen Frankenthaler

was a color-field painter, who poured diluted paint acrylic on unprimed canvas so the paint could soak in the fabric.

Judy Chicago

was a feminist artist who wanted to educate viewers about women's roles in history and the fine arts. The Dinner Party was a reinterpretation of the Last Supper. Because she uncovered so many important women, she did an installation of 39 women on a triangular table as an installation. Many of the plates had motifs of butterflies and vulvas

Gordon Parks

was a groundbreaking American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist and film director. He is best remembered for his photo essays for Life magazine and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft; black started out to be a fashion Photographer ; famous picture 'American Gothic'

Tony Smith

was a minimalist who created basic geometric forms , which reduced the forms to their "objecthood" Art theorist. sculptor

Duane Hanson

was a superrealist in sculpture who made plaster casts from live models and filled the molds with polyester resin. He painted his figures with an airbrush, decorated them with wigs and clothes and had them doing everyday middle class stuff.

David Smith

was an Abstract Expressionist sculptor. Using large metal geometric forms he burnished the surface to create texture. His work was meant for the outdoors.