Art-312 (Second Midterm)

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 1. What is the subject? What sources/influences are included? 2. What makes this work modern and shocking to viewers then?

1. It depicts five naked women (bathers) composed of flat, splintered planes whose faces were inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. Prostitutes he visited when he was in Barcelona, Spain. The compressed space they inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards, while a slice of melon in the still life at the bottom of the composition teeters on an 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 brothels. 2. The artwork caused an uproar when it was exhibited, as it depicted nude females in a nontraditional manner. These females are angular, unfeminine, and unflinching in their nudity. Strange and confrontational, very abstract.

Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of Adolf Loos, 1909 1. Why and how is this portrait "expressionist?" 2. What makes this portrait modern?

Austrian Expressionism 1. portraits that show an extremely sensitive preoccupation with the character of the subjects, as well as an increasing concern with expressing this character through colour. 2. he made use of delicate, agitated lines to describe figures, which he painted in relatively naturalistic colours. Kokoschka exaggerated certain features and gestures of the sitters to express their psychological states.

Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905 1. How does each of these 4 Picasso artworks fit into its period in terms of subject matter and style? 2. How would you summarize what Cubism was trying to do?

Rose 1. Family of Saltimbanques pays tribute to the circus's stock players while also serving as autobiography. The dark, brooding silhouette of Harlequin—in diamond-printed costume, far left—is the dark, intense young artist himself. The original tonality of this painting was bluish. Scientific study has revealed three other states of this image under its final version. In them, Picasso altered figures and composition and switched from blue to rose, consciously allowing the darker paint to show through as he reworked his canvas. In this way, he created contour as well as a dusky, veiled atmosphere worthy of his waif-like figures.referencing back to Picasso's past. Critics have suggested Family of Saltimbanques is a covert group portrait of Picasso and his circle, symbolized as poor, independent and isolated.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Untitled advertising poster, 1924 1. What is the purpose of this work? 2. How is it tied to the goals of the Revolution?

Russian Constructivism 1. In the early 1930s he embraced photography as a tool for social commentary, critically depicting the disparity between the idealized and lived Soviet experience. The images he made contrasted with Socialist Realism, which was declared the official style of art in the Soviet Union in 1934 - Preferring the saccharine depictions of positive, heroic, and idealized subjects unencumbered by the trials and tribulations of everyday life, Soviet critics found Rodchenko's photography too formalist at times 2. Alexander Rodchenko is perhaps the most important avant-garde artist to have put his art in the service of political revolution. In this regard, his career is a model of the clash between modern art and radical politics. He emerged as a fairly conventional painter, but his encounters with Russian Futurists propelled him to become an influential founder of the Constructivist movement

André Derain, Turning Road, L'Estaque, 1906 1. What makes this a Fauve work? 2.What other modern artist had painted in this area?

Fauve 1. The identity of a Fauve painting was predominantly through the use of bright colors. The colors are not only vibrant and attractive but also are used in complementary pairs of colors from the color wheel. This color contradiction is highlighted all throughout the painting with the orange tree trunks and multi-colored leaves with colors from blue-green-red. broken brush strokes that are swift and flat daubs of color as his painterly style of expressing his emotions behind the painting. 2. Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Madame Matisse/The Green Line, 1905 (Fauve) 1. How is this portrait characteristic of Fauvism? 2. What non-European influences are present here?

Fauve 1. Matisse took expressive use of color and laid them down in the color patch technique, simplifying the shapes of Madame Matisse's head. Expanded upon the competing values of two and three dimensionality within art, using them to create tension within his work. 2. It was considered to be ugly

Henri Matisse, Luxe, calme et volupté, 1904-05 1. What is the subject/tradition of this landscape? 2. What prior modern art movement influences this stylistically?

Fauvism 1. Luxe, Calme et Volupté takes its name from the refrain of Charles Baudelaire's poem, Invitation to a Voyage (1857), in which a man invites his lover to travel with him to paradise. The painting shares the poem's subject: escape to an imaginary, tranquil refuge. 2. It displays an evolution of the Neo-Impressionist style mixed with a new conceptual meaning based in fantasy and leisure that had not been seen in works before

Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905-06 1.What French art tradition does this belong to? 2. What elements are included in this painting?

Fauvism 1. depicts an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. 2. color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas. bold colors, the jarring shifts in scale, and the distorted anatomies

Henri Matisse, Blue Nude, 1907 1. Why was this painting so shocking? 2. What non-European influences are present here?

Fauvism 1. structured very strange, disproportionate. Most viewers were unaccustomed to the artist's radical use of vibrant color and expressive form. Like them, the press responded with hostility to his perceived disrespect for artistic tradition. They described his work as "distorted and toadlike, 2. The curves of the woman's body recall both the paintings of Paul Cézanne and the forms of African sculpture-two important influences on Matisse's work during this period.

Gino Severini, Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, 1912 1. What art movement/s inform his Bal Tabarin?

Futurist 1. Severini was fascinated by the dancehall as a subject for the opportunity it offered for the depiction of multisensory experience. Here he pictures a woman with brown curls and a white, blue, and pink flounced dress as she dances to music in the Paris nightclub Bal Tabarin -Different elements of the work point to current events—the Arab riding a camel refers to the Turco-Italian War of 1911, and flags convey sentiments of nationalism - n his depiction of Bal Tabarin the artist merges the Futurists' interest in capturing the dynamism of motion with the integration of text and collage elements, such as sequins, influenced by his study of (French Cubism). Severini was a fervent Italian nationalist, but he insisted that his fellow Futurists come to Paris, as he had, to learn about the latest developments in modern art.

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 1. How is this sculpture related to Futurist's themes? 2. In what ways is it traditional?

Futurist 1. motion, multiple perspectives and angles. Analytic cubism - integrates trajectories of speed and force into the representation of a striding figure. It does not depict a particular person at a specific moment, but rather synthesizes the process of walking into a single body. For Boccioni, one of the key figures in the Italian Futurist movement, this was an ideal form: a figure in constant motion, immersed in space, engaged with the forces acting upon it. 2. The air displaced by the figure's movement is rendered in forms no different than those of the actual body. See, for example, the flame-like shapes that begin at the calves and show the air swirling away from the body in motion.

Giorgio De Chirico, The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, 1914 1. Why is this work considered "metaphysical?" 2. What imagery does he use to create mystery and melancholy?

Metaphysical School 1. combining of two unlikely things The predecessor of the Surrealist movement, Giorgio de Chirico intentionally subverted fictive spaces, typically city squares bordered by arcades or brick walls, to create enigmatic experience and refute reality. The artist became interested in notion of the eternal return and re-enactment of the myth after reading the German philosophers, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche. It was French poet Guillaume Apollinaire who first called de Chirico's work 'metaphysical', from where the Metaphysical Art movement originated, with Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà as its leaders. - Mystery and Melancholy of a Street is one of Giorgio de Chirico's unmatched images of deserted public spaces rendered in simple geometric forms. The painting represents an encounter between two figures: a small girl running with a hoop and a statue that is present in the painting only through its shadow. The girl is moving towards the source of bright light coming from behind the building on the right and illuminating intensively the arcades on the left. The bright yellow corridor stretched up to the horizon separates two zones: light and darkness. -The utilization of dark and light within the structures creates a tense atmosphere of entrapment. De Chirico utilizes two contradictory vanishing points. None of de Chirico's works can really be portrayed as examples of subliminal painting or automatism in art. The incorporation of subjects and items like a running young lady, with a circle hoop, and the shadow of the statue appear to make no sense.

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 1. How does each of these 4 Picasso artworks fit into its period in terms of subject matter and style? 2. How would you summarize what Cubism was trying to do?

Synthetic Cubism 1. Georges Braque and Picasso co-invent the first phase of Cubism. Since it is dominated by the analysis of form, this first stage is usually referred to as Analytic Cubism. One of the keys to understanding the importance of Cubism, of Picasso and Braque, is to consider their actions and how unusual they were for the time. When Braque, and then Picasso placed industrially-produced objects ("low" commercial culture) into the realm of fine art ("high" culture), they acted as artistic iconoclasts

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1925 1. What is this abstract sculpture depicting? 2. How does it convey meaning?

(NO MOVEMENT) 1. the theme of a bird in flight preoccupied Brancusi. He concentrated on the animals' movement, rather than their physical attributes.he sculpture does not portray a figurative representation of what most people would recognize as a bird in flight. Rather, it resembles an elegant, vertical form, like a wave of energy vaulting up from the ground. 2. The perspective Brâncuși advocated for is that everything represents something, even if it only represents itself, so all art is therefore representative; and yet every plastic representation of something is understood in the realm of ideas, meaning all art is fundamentally abstract. A beautiful, delicate balance exists somewhere between these points of view, much like the beautiful, delicate balance of "Bird in Space."

Pablo Picasso, Maquette for Guitar, 1912 1. What was this work made from? 2Why was it radical? 3. How does it relate to Cubist experimentation?

1. Picasso took pieces of cardboard, paper, string, and wire that he then folded, threaded, and glued together, making it the first sculpture assembled from disparate parts. 2. he modern ordinariness of both of these materials is very different from traditional sculptural materials such as bronze, wood, and marble. The planes of the sheet-metal construction engage in a play of substance and void in which volume is suggested, not depicted. In a dramatic demonstration of the flexible way visual forms can be read in context, the guitar's sound hole, which normally recedes from the instrument's smooth surface, here projects outward into space. 3. It's an abstract representation of a guitar, an artwork, but one that doesn't fit neatly into the tradition of Western representational sculpture. It is not a solid mass carved from marble or cast in bronze; it is not on a pedestal, nor is it attached to a background like a relief.

Marc Chagall, Paris Through the Window, 1913 1. What artistic and folk traditions are evident in this work?

1. Russia, post-impressionism, Cubism - appears to reflect upon Chagall's feeling of divided loyalties - his love both for modern Paris and for the older patterns of life back in Russia. Hence the figure in the bottom right looks both ways, and the couple below the Eiffel Tower seems to be split apart. Chagall makes no attempt here to dissect the subject or view it from multiple angles. Instead he searches for beauty in the details, creating what writer Guillaume Apollinaire called "sur-naturalist" elements, such as a two-faced head and floating human figure. The end result is a brilliantly balanced and visually appealing snapshot of Paris, juxtaposing the imaginary and the real, all seen through eyes that are both eccentric and loving.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910 1. How does each of these 4 Picasso artworks fit into its period in terms of subject matter and style? 2. How would you summarize what Cubism was trying to do?

Analytic Cubism 1. Kahnweiler opened an art gallery in Paris in 1907and in 1908 began representing Pablo Picasso, whom he introduced to Georges Braque. Kahnweiler was a great champion of the artists' revolutionary experiment with Cubism and purchased the majority of their paintings between 1908 and 1915. He also wrote an important book, The Rise of Cubism, in 1920, which offered a theoretical framework for the movement. - Painting represents a further incursion into the break-up of form to the point at which the sitter seems barely discernible, Kahnweiler's face can just about be picked out in the upper-right of the image, identifiable mainly by the inclusion of a wave of hair and a simple line to suggest a moustache. Two similar lines in the lower centre of the image register his watch chain, whilst his clasped hands can be seen at bottom-centre. Interestingly, Picasso included on African mask in the top-left, though this is barely discernible. From this point onwards, Cubism would rapidly develop into on even more experimental and challenging art form.

Pablo Picasso, La Vie (Life), 1903 1. How does each of these 4 Picasso artworks fit into its period in terms of subject matter and style? 2. How would you summarize what Cubism was trying to do?

Blue 1. An important example of expressionism, La Vie was Picasso's memorial tribute to his close friend Carlos Casagemas (1881-1901), a fellow Spanish art student who had accompanied him on his first trip to Paris. A moody individual with a taste for Nietzsche and a tendency to depression, Casagemas fell in love with an artist's model called Germaine Pichot (1880-1948). Germaine rejected his advances - either because she was already married, or because he was impotent. And so, on February 17th of the following year, when Picasso was in Spain, Casagemas went out to dinner with friends at the L'Hippodrome, and at about 9:00 p.m. stood up, gave a brief speech and then pulled out a pistol and shot Germaine in the head. Not realizing that the bullet had only grazed her temple, he then shot himself in the head. 2. The cubists wanted to show the whole structure of objects in their paintings without using techniques such as perspective or graded shading to make them look realistic. They wanted to show things as they really are - not just to show what they look like. Cubist painters were inspired by the energy which exuded from Paris at the turn of the century. The central goal of Cubist art, and thus the focus of the Cubist aesthetic, was to attack every accepted convention of standard painting.

Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque, 1908 1. What earlier artist influenced this painting? How?

Cubist 1. The painting prompted art critic Louis Vauxcelles to mock it as being composed of cubes which led to the name of the movement. It is a response to works by Paul Cézanne who also lived in L'Estaque at times. - Until this point, Braque had been painting in the Fauvist style, but, after seeing Cézanne's work, began to experiment, as seen in this piece. Houses at l'Estaque uses a muted, earthy colour palette, which became a staple of Braque's work. He has also broken the traditional rules of perspective: there is no central vanishing point and the foreground is impossible to distinguish from the background. Most important, though, is the simplification of the houses and trees in the painting to their barest geometric forms, while paradoxically using shading to create depth within these shapes. Braque began to work in partnership with Pablo Picasso, who had developed a similar style. Together the two established Cubism, which proved to be the most prolific movement of the 20th century.

Gino Severini, Red Cross Train Passing a Village, 1915 1. How is subject of Red Cross Train tied to Futurist themes?

Cubist 1. technology of train, war, crossing signals, visual language of sound. - In this painting of a train moving through the countryside, Severini split the landscape in order to impart a sense of the momentary fractured images that characterize our perception of a speeding object. The clash of intense contrasting colors suggests the noise and power of the train, which the Futurists admired as an emblem of vitality and potency. - Severini's paintings—like Futurist work in general—are informed by the legacy of Cubism, building on the Cubists' deconstruction of the motif, their collage technique, and their incorporation of graphic signs - But the Futurists' interest in depicting motion, use of bright expressive color, and politically inspired dedication to bridging the gap between art and life departed decisively from Cubist aesthetic practice, which focused on the rarefied world of the studio, investigating formal issues through often-somber portraits and still lifes.

Giacomo Balla, Street Light, 1909 1. What prior theories of color and form influenced this work? 2. How is this subject related to Futurism?

Futurist. 1. Since Street Light was painted early in the Futurist movement, Balla's style here is still essentially Divisionist in its approach. Balla uses obvious, bold brushstrokes in a repeated V-pattern to illustrate the light and energy radiating from the lamp. The saturated colors of Street Light—from the almost blinding white and yellow at the center of the lamp, to the cooler hues further from the light's bulb—are also typically Divisionist. - "post-Impressionism." 2. Balla has rejected traditional subject matter in this painting, and instead has painted an object that is forthrightly modern and technological: one of the new, electric street lamps that were just being installed at this time in Rome, where Balla lived. The introduction of electrified city lighting must have been an exciting sign of technological advancement for the Futurists, and also a powerful symbol of how the ancient city of Rome was finally abandoning its past and entering the modern age.

Emil Nolde, Female Dancer, 1913 1. How is this tied to the themes/subjects of The Bridge group? 2. What makes this an "expressionist" painting?

German Expressionism 1. This image, in a primeval setting, was inspired by modern experimental dance, of which Nolde was an aficionado, and by the artist's fascination with "primitive" non-European cultures, which he thought to possess an authenticity not present in European culture. 2. With her legs splayed, arms fluttering, and hair streaming, Nolde's ecstatic dancer represents a joyful embodiment of all that he and other Expressionists most passionately celebrated: instinctual, unfettered emotion, erotic energy, and spiritual freedom.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, 1908 The Bridge: 1.How is this tied to the themes/subjects of The Bridge group? 2. What makes this an "expressionist" painting?

German Expressionism 1. expressive possibilities of color, form, and composition in creating images of contemporary life. Street, Dresden is a bold expression of the intensity, dissonance, and anxiety of the modern city. 2. Sense of alienation. The scene radiates tension. Its packed pedestrians are locked in a constricting space; the plane of the sidewalk, in an unsettlingly intense pink. faces are expressionless, almost masklike.

Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses, 1911 1. What is the color symbolism here? 2. How is this work connected to the themes of the Blue Rider group?

German Expressionist 1. Blue was, to him, a masculine colour that also indicated spirituality. The three blue horses were intended to portray peaceful harmony, contrasted with the violence and aggression of the red hills behind them. before he died he told his wife that the painting was a premonition of the war. He had written on the back of the painting, "And all being is flaming agony." 2. The horses take up almost the entire canvas, so that they become abstract. Abstraction is changing, rearranging, distorting or deforming something from its original state. He was a very spiritual man and he felt that animals were innocent and close to God. He also had theories about color, believing, for example, that yellow is a feminine color and blue is masculine. In The Large Blue Horses the animals look strong and muscular, but they also seem like tender, emotional creatures. The painting demonstrates Marc's sensitivity to the natural world.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913 1. What is non-objective art? 2. What is his "subject" in this work?

German Expressionist 1. Non-objective art is abstract or non-representational art. It tends to be geometric and does not represent specific objects, people, or other subjects found in the natural world. One of the best-known non-objective artists is Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), a pioneer of abstract art. 2. By means of records and some works examination art historians defined that the Composition VII is a combination of several themes namely Resurrection, the Judgment Day, the Flood and the Garden of Eden.

El Lissitzky, The Constructor (Self-Portrait), 1924 1. What is modern about the artist's use of photography here? 2. What Constructivist concept of the artist is conveyed in this self-portrait?

Russian Constructivism 1. a photomontage that used geometric shapes to complete it. 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. 2. This represents how Lissitzky thought of himself, a perfectionist. At this time Russia became more revolutionary. Machines were beginning to process in mass and the people around the machines became accustom to them. Lissitzky is also influenced by machine which contributes to the perfect lines of the artwork. - The machines were the revolution that El Lissitzky makes relevant with the circle that goes in the middle of his art work. The point of constructivist art was to push forward from the past. - Along with that we see the letter "XYZ." These letters idealize that this is the end of previous art work. "XYZ" leads into the revolutionary circle symbolizing that new constructivist art is the future. - The Constructor, as Lissitzky calls himself in the portrait, is fighting against all that is "old fashioned." The use of the compass, geometric shapes, machine color gives a different view of art and of the artist. El Lissitzky's goal for constructivist art was to revolutionize the style of art so that constructivist art work is so amazing that it diminishes the past old-fashioned art.

Vladimir Tatlin,Counter-Relief, 1915 1. What materials does he use in Counter-Reliefs? 2. What did the artist mean by his principle of "truth to materials?" 3. What makes this a Constructivist work?

Russian Constructivism 1. made with plaster, iron, and glass. Tatlin's fascination with natural materials such wood, wire, and metals further inspired Tatlin to take a more constructivist attitude 2. The novelty of the Corner Counter-Relief lied in the artist's desire to abandon the traditional "painting plane" and to bring nonobjective constructions into space formed by two inclined panes. They were used not only for the hanging of the composition, but also to create an abstract background emphasizing its volume - t was also important for the artist to show all abilities of the materials used by him. In this work they represent opposed yet inseparable notions - flexibility and rigidness, freedom and tension, movement and calmness. 3. Tatlin used these "real" materials because he believed that art could be practical and utilitarian, therefore he used utilitarian objects to create his reliefs. Tatlin was intrigued about the flexibility and durability of these materials, and created Counter-Relief to see what different shapes and angles he could create out of the seemingly unbendable materials. - Tatlin wanted to prove his viewers that art didn't have to be a two-dimensional painting or photograph. He wanted to show that art could coexist with his viewers' daily lives and could also cohabitate in with their environment.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915 1. In what ways does this express the Suprematists' goal of "supremacy of pure feelings?" 2. Why did Malevich paint just a black square?

Russian Suprematism 1. He made his intention clear; he wanted to completely abandon depicting reality and instead invent a new world of shapes and forms. Malevich called his new abstract approach to painting suprematism. Suprematism is all about the supremacy of colour and shape in painting. By sticking to simple geometric shapes and a limited range of colours he could focus on the painting itself and not be distracted by representing a scene, or landscape or a person. - Malevich didn't intend for the Black Square to be a representation of a real thing, but a symbol of a dawning new age. 2. Malevich set out to change forever the idea that painting has to represent reality. It's intriguing to think how doing something simple or even seemingly dull, can sometimes be revolutionary. That's what makes the Black Square a radical thing, however you look at it.