Art Appreciation Exam 2 Sculptures/works

The Annunciation, Robert Campin and workshop

Another noteworthy aspect of Campin's altarpiece is its astonishingly small size. If its two side panels are closed over the central panel, as they are designed to, the altarpiece is just over 2 feet square—making it entirely portable. This little altarpiece is itself a material object, so intimate and detailed that it functions more like the book that lies open on the table than a painting. It is very different from the altarpieces being made in Italy during the same period. Most of those were monumental in scale and painted in fresco, permanently embedded in the wall, and therefore not portable. Campin's altarpiece is made to be held up close, in the hands, not surveyed from afar, suggesting its function as a private, rather than public, devotional object.

Woman of Willendorf

Besides cave paintings, early artists also created sculptural objects—small carved figures of people (mostly women) and animals. These reflect a more abstract and less naturalistic approach to representation, as illustrated in a limestone statuette of a woman found at Willendorf, in modern Austria (Fig. 16-2)

Head of a King or Oba

By the middle of the twelfth century, Ife culture was producing highly naturalistic brass sculptures depicting its rulers. An example is the Head of a King (or Oni) (Fig. 17-32). The parallel lines that run down the face represent decorative effects made by scarring—scarification. The hole in the lower neck suggests that the head may have been attached to a wooden mannequin, and in memorial services the mannequin may well have worn the royal robes of the Ife court.

Theodora and Her Attendants. Justinian and His Attendants

If the facade of San Vitale is very plain, more or less unadorned, local brick, inside it is elaborately decorated with marble and glittering mosaics, including two elaborate mosaics that face each other on the side walls of the apse, one depicting Theodora, the wife of Justinian (Fig. 17‑7), and the other Justinian himself

A Facility Based on Change, Tajima

In 2010, the focus of the art21 film, Mika Tajima found 26 Action Office wall panels dating from 1971 for sale at a telemarketing office in Bayonne, New Jersey, and purchased them to use as "readymades" in a sculptural installation named after Propst's book and meant to underscore the bleak realities of the dehumanizing work spaces that Propst's modernist aesthetic created (Fig. 15-44)

Le Boulevard du Temple, Daguerre

In France, a different process, which yielded a positive image on a polished metal plate, was named the daguerreotype (Fig. 11-7), after one of its two inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (Nicéphore Niépce had died in 1833, leaving Daguerre to perfect the process and garner the laurels). Public reaction was wildly enthusiastic, and the French and English press faithfully reported every development in the greatest detail.

Apoxyomenos (The Scraper)

In a Roman copy of a lost original by Lysippus known as the Apoxyomenos (Fig. 16-24), or The Scraper, an athlete removes oil and dirt from his body with an instrument called a strigil. He seems detached from his circumstances, as if recalling his victory, both physically and mentally uncontained by the space in which he stands.

Morris and Company, chairs

In his designs, Morris constantly emphasized two principles: simplicity and utility. Desire for simplicity—"simplicity of life," as he put it, "begetting simplicity of taste"—soon led him to create what he called "workaday furniture," the best example of which is the company's line of Sussex rush-seated chairs (Fig. 15‑5)

Imponderabilia, Marina Abramovic and Ulay

In much performance art, the physical presence of the body in space becomes a primary concern. The performance team of Marina Abramović and Uwe Laysiepen (known as Ulay) made this especially clear in works such as Imponderabilia, performed in 1977 at a gallery in Milan, Italy (Fig. 12-34). They stood less than a foot apart, naked and facing each other, in the main entrance to the gallery, so that people entering the space had to choose which body—male or female—to face as they squeezed between them. A hidden camera filmed each member of the public as he or she passed through the "living door," and their "passage" was then projected on the gallery wall. Choosing which body to face, rub against, and literally feel, forced each viewer to confront their own attitudes and feelings about sexuality and gender. Abramović and Ulay's bodies composed the material substance of the work and so did the bodies of the audience members, who suddenly found themselves part of the artwork itself—at least they did for 90 minutes, until the police stopped the performance.

Venus, Henri Matisse

In this Venus (Fig. 8-21), the figure of the goddess is revealed in the negative space of the composition. It is as if the goddess of love—and hence love itself—were immaterial. In the blue positive space to the right we discover the profile of a man's head, as if love springs, fleetingly, from his very breath.

Live-Taped Video Corridor, Bruce Nauman

Installations such as Bruce Nauman's Live-Taped Video Corridor (Fig. 11-36) were designed precisely to underscore the sometimes startling effects of such immediacy. The piece consisted of two floor-to-ceiling panels forming a tunnel the length of a room. At the far end were two video monitors stacked on top of one another. As viewers inched their way down the corridor one at a time, it gradually became clear that they were walking toward their own image, shot from a surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling. The experience was tantamount to suddenly finding oneself in some sinister surveillance operation, the possibility of which had become increasingly real by the early 1970s as closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems proliferated across the country—in 1969, police cameras had been installed in the New York City Municipal Building near City Hall, and other cities soon followed suit, their CCTV systems constantly monitored by officers.

The Capture of the Sabine Woman, Giambologna

It was, in fact, simply to demonstrate his inventive skill that Giambologna undertook to carve the sculpture. He conceived of it as three serpentine, or spiraling, figures, lacking a single predominant view, without specific reference, let alone title. But when the head of the Florentine government decided to place it in the Loggia della Signoria, a focal point of Florentine life, Giambologna was asked to name it. He suggested that the woman might be Andromeda, wife of Perseus, a statue of whom already graced the space. Somebody else, however, suggested the Sabines as a subject, and the sculpture has been known as The Capture of the Sabine Women ever since. (According to legend, the founders of ancient Rome, unable to find wives among their neighbors, the Sabines, tricked the entire tribe into visiting Rome for a festival and then took its women by force.) What mattered was not the piece's subject, however, but its sculptural genius in uniting three figures in a single successful spiral composition.

Guggenheim Museum, Frank Gehry

Just as I. M. Pei's expansion of the Louvre, with its glass pyramid, was designed to revitalize the French capital itself, in the 1990s American architect Frank Gehry's design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Fig. 14-47) was a project conceived as part of a plan to reinvigorate the Basque fishing port and industrial city of Bilbao in northern Spain

Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol

Like Roger Shimomura, Andy Warhol is a Pop artist who recognized in silkscreen printing possibilities not only for making images but for commenting on American culture in general. In his many silkscreen images of Marilyn Monroe, almost all made within three or four years of her death in 1962, he depicted her in garish, conflicting colors (Fig. 10-30).

Whispers from the Walls, Whitfield Lovell

Lovell says that the inspiration for drawing on walls came from a 1993 visit to an Italian villa that had been owned by a slave trader: "Somehow the experience of being in the villa and knowing its history was so haunting that I could not work the way I was accustomed to working. . . . I wanted to leave some dignified images of black people in that space." Whispers from the Walls is, in this sense, Lovell's attempt to restore to contemporary America—and Denton, Texas in particular—that dignity.

Jar, Maria Martinez and Julian Martinez

María Martinez's black jar (Fig. 13-7) is an example of a second technique often used in ceramic construction, coiling, in which the clay is rolled out in long, ropelike strands that are coiled on top of each other. As the potter builds the coils up in a continuous spiral, each strand is smoothed and blended one to the next, eliminating any trace of the original ropes of clay and making pot walls of uniform thickness. Before firing, the pot is burnished or polished to a high gloss, usually with a stone.

Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, Julia Margaret Cameron

On her forty-ninth birthday, in 1864, Julia Margaret Cameron, the wife of a high-placed British civil servant and friend to many of the most famous people of her day, was given a camera and collodion-processing equipment by her daughter and son-in-law. "It may amuse you, Mother, to photograph," the accompanying note said. Cameron set up a studio in a chicken coop at her home on the Isle of Wight, and over the course of the next ten years convinced almost everyone she knew to pose for her, among them the greatest men of British art, literature, and science. She often blurred their features slightly, believing this technique drew attention away from mere physical appearance and revealed more of her sitter's inner character. Commenting on her photographs of famous men like Thomas Carlyle (Fig. 11-9), she wrote, "When I have had such men before my camera, my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner man as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer."

Annie G., Cantering, Saddled, Muybridge

Photography began, in about 1838, with still images, but the still image almost immediately generated the thought that it might be possible to capture the object in motion as well. Such a dream seemed even more possible when photographs of a horse trotting were published by Eadweard Muybridge in La Nature in 1878 (Fig. 11-2). Muybridge had used a trip-wire device in an experiment commissioned by California governor Leland Stanford to settle a bet about whether there were moments in the stride of a trotting or galloping horse when it was entirely free of the ground.

Primavera, Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli's Primavera (Fig. 9-11), painted for a chamber next to the bedroom of his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, is one of the greatest tempera paintings ever made. As a result of its restoration in 1978, we know a good deal about how it was painted. The figures and trees were painted on an undercoat—white for the figures, black for the trees. The transparency of the drapery was achieved by layering thin yellow washes of transparent medium over the white undercoat. As many as 30 coats of color, transparent or opaque, depending on the relative light or shadow of the area being painted, were required to create each figure.

Study of a Woman's Head, Leonardo Da Vinci

Shadow is rendered here by means of careful hatching. At the same time, a sense of movement and energy is evoked not only by the directional force of these parallels, but also by the freedom of Leonardo's line, the looseness of the gesture even in this most demanding of formats.

Sharecropper, Elizabeth Catlett

Sharecropper, Elizabeth Catlett

Great Serpent Mound

Spiral Jetty was directly inspired by the Great Serpent Mound, an ancient Native American earthwork in Adams County, Ohio (Fig. 12-28). Built by the Hopewell culture sometime between 600 bce and 200 ce, it is nearly a quarter of a mile long. And though almost all other Hopewell mounds contain burials, this one does not. Its "head" consists of an oval enclosure that may have served some ceremonial purpose, and its tail is a spiral. The spiral would, in fact, become a favorite decorative form of the later Mississippian cultures. The monumental achievement of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, made with dump trucks and bulldozers, is dwarfed by the extraordinary workmanship and energy that must have gone into the construction of this prehistoric earthwork.

The Glorification of St. Ignatius, Fra Andrea Pozzo

Standing in the nave, or central portion of the church, and looking upward, the congregation had the illusion that the roof of the church had been removed, revealing the glories of Heaven. A master of perspective, about which he wrote an influential treatise, Pozzo realized his effects by extending the architecture in paint one story above the actual windows in the vault. St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, is shown being transported on a cloud toward the waiting Christ. The foreshortening of the many figures, becoming ever smaller in size as they rise toward the center of the ceiling, greatly adds to the realistic, yet awe-inspiring, effect.

Delftsche Slaolie, Jan Toorop

The Dutch artist Jan Toorop's advertising poster for a peanut-based salad oil (Fig. 15‑13) flattens the long, spiraling hair of the two women preparing salad into a pattern very like the elaborate wrought-iron grillework also characteristic of Art Nouveau design.

Pantheon

The Romans were also the first to perfect the dome, which takes the shape of a hemisphere, sometimes defined as a continuous arch rotated 360 degrees on its axis. Conceived as a temple to celebrate all their gods, the Roman Pantheon (Fig. 14-17)—from the Greek words pan ("every") and theos ("god")—consists of a 142-foot-high dome set on a cylindrical wall 140 feet in diameter

Pyramids of Giza

The architecture of the vast majority of early civilizations was designed to imitate natural forms. The significance of the pyramids of Egypt (Fig. 14-2) is the subject of much debate, but their form may well derive from the image of the god Re, who in ancient Egypt was symbolized by the rays of the sun descending to earth. A text in one pyramid reads: "I have trodden these rays as ramps under my feet." As one approached the mammoth pyramids, covered in limestone to reflect the light of the sun, the eye was carried skyward to Re, the Sun itself, who was, in the desert, the central fact of life

Hagia Sophia, Anthemius and Isidorus

The church of Hagia Sophia, meaning "Holy Wisdom," was his imperial place of worship in Constantinople (Figs. 17-3 and 17-4). The huge interior, crowned by a dome, is reminiscent of the circular, central plan of Ravenna's San Vitale (see Fig. 17-6), but this dome is abutted at either end by half-domes that extend the central core of the church along a longitudinal axis reminiscent of the basilica, with the apse extending in another smaller half-dome out one end of the axis. These half-domes culminate in arches that are repeated on the two sides of the dome as well.

Great Stupa at Sanchi

The philosophy of the Buddha is based on a message of self-denial and meditation, which he preached across northern India, attracting converts from all levels of Indian society. The religion gained strength for centuries after the Buddha's death and finally became institutionalized in India under the rule of Ashoka (273-232 bce). Deeply saddened by the horrors of war, and believing that his power rested ultimately in religious virtue and not military force, Ashoka became an ardent pacifist and a great patron of the Buddhist monks, erecting some 84,000 shrines, called stupas, throughout India, all elaborately decorated with sculpture and painting. The stupa is literally a burial mound, dating from prehistoric times, but by the time the Great Stupa at Sanchi was made (Fig. 16-37)—it is the earliest surviving example of the form—it had come to house important relics of the Buddha himself or the remains of later Buddhist holy persons.

Victorian Couple, Shonibare

This, too, is the subject for artist Yinka Shonibare. Like Chris Ofili (see Fig. 1-25), Shonibare was born in England to Nigerian parents, but unlike Ofili he was raised in Nigeria before returning to art school in London. In the mid-1990s, he began making works out of the colorful printed fabrics that are worn throughout West Africa (Fig. 13-28), all of which are created by English and Dutch designers, manufactured in Europe, then exported to Africa, whence they are in turn remarketed to the West as authentic African design.

Queen Nefertiti

Though the traditional standardized proportions of the human body were only slightly modified, artists seemed more intent on depicting special features of the human body—hands and fingers, the details of a face. Nowhere is this attention to detail more evident than in the famous bust of Akhenaten's queen, Nefertiti (Fig. 16-11).