Chapter 2 Art

Describe the relationship between words and images..

Both images and words can refer to things that we see or experience in the world, but they are not the things themselves. Nevertheless, words help us to explain what we see or experience, and are fundamental to visual literacy. If an artwork's subject matter might be readily apparent, articulating its content—what the artwork fully means—requires that we use words.

retablo

A frame, usually ornate, enclosing decorated panels, paintings, and other revered objects rising above and behind an altar.

restricted palette

A selection of colors limited in its range of hues.

representational art

Any work of art that seeks to resemble the world of natural appearance.

How does Jean-Michel Basquiat's Charles the First represent a personal iconography?

Basquiat represents elements of his cultural heritage as a social commentary on racial segregation and alienation.

Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes

Carambola (Fig. 2-14), like all of her work, is based on the square, and, not coincidentally, she counts Malevich among those whose work has most influenced her own. She begins each work with a square, and then, she says, "I build things on top of it.

Explain how cultural conventions can inform our interpretation of works of art.

Cultural conventions are often carried from one generation to the next through iconography. Iconography is a system of images whose meaning is understood by a certain cultural group. The images used in iconography represent concepts or beliefs beyond literal subject matter.

Willem de Kooningq

North Atlantic Light, 1977.

What distinguishes naturalism from other types of realism?

Realism sought to be a faithful representation of life, while naturalism was more like a "chronicle of despair."

How does representational art differ from abstract art?

Representational art/photography is something that represents the original image. ... Abstract art uses concepts to reflect / create images and emotions.

Distinguish between representation and abstraction.

Representational artworks portray recognizable forms. The more the representation resembles what the eye sees, the more it is said to be an example of realism.

What does Albert Bierdstadt represent in his painting Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast?

Super realistic looking, but couldn't actually be real fantastical - light used to make it look heavenly

René Magritte

The Treason of Images, Ceci n'est past une pipe 1929. reproduced an image of a pipe similar to that found in tobacco store signs and ads of his time. The caption under the pipe translates into English as "This is not a pipe,"

abstract

The less a work resembles real things in the real world,

Wolf Kahn's Afterglow

The painting consists of four bands of color. In the near foreground is the edge of a field, behind it a band of trees in dark shadow, and behind the trees a blue cloud and an orange-hued sunset sky.

How does form differ from content?

The term form refers to the work's style, techniques and media used, and how the elements of design are implemented. Content, on the other hand, refers to a work's subject matter, or what is being depicted.

photorealistic

When a painting is so realistic that it appears to be a photograph,

What is a mudra?

a symbolic hand gesture used in Hindu and Buddhist ceremonies and statuary, and in Indian dance.

iconography

a system of visual images the meaning of which is widely understood by a given culture or cultural group.

visual literacy

able to recognize why you like it, how it communicates to you. ability to describe and interpret what we see. demands careful observation

Why is calligraphy important in Islamic art?

calligraphy is held in such high esteem is a holy one. Words, of course, form the defining text of Islam, the Koran. And calligraphy is the art of beautifully forming words so as to bring an elevation of spirit to those who read them.

symbols

hat is, they represent something more than their literal meaning.

Naturalism

is a brand of representation in which the artist retains apparently realistic elements—in Bierstadt's case, accurate representations of Western flora and fauna, as well as Native American dress and costume

Australian Aboriginal artist Old Mick Tjakamarra's Honey Art Dreaming (

is, in fact, a landscape, it is not immediately recognizable as one. The organizing logic of most Aboriginal art isthe so-called Dreaming, a system of belief unlike that of most other religions in the world. The Dreaming is not literally dreaming as we think of it

How do Kazimir Malevich and Beatriz Milhazes use form in their works?

milhazes: the shapes, forms, and bright colors of Brazilian culture malevich: Suprematist Painting, Black Rectangle, Blue Triangle shows no reference to the natural world of images, it is usually called: nonrepresenational

What role does form typically play in nonobjective art?

often a study of geometry. ... It tends to be geometric and does not represent specific objects, people, ... in nature, instead relying on shape, line, and form with no particular subject. ... They may play with bold colors

Words

refer to the world in the abstract.

Images

represent the world, or reproduce its appearance.

Form

s the overall structure of a work of art.

Discuss how form, as opposed to content, might also help us to understand the meaning of a work of art.

Form is the overall structure of an artwork. It includes such aspects as the artwork's materials and the organization of its parts into a composition.

calligraphy

Handwriting as a form of art

iconoclasts

Literally "image breakers," those who, taking the Bible's commandment against the worship of "graven" images literally, wished to destroy images in religious settings.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square. ca. 1923-30

Malevich's painting is really about the relation between the black square and the white ground behind it.

realism

The more the representation resembles what the eye sees,

Allah, Shirin Neshat

combines words and images in startling ways. In Rebellious Silence (Fig. 2-3), Neshat portrays herself as a Muslim woman, dressed in a black chador, the traditional covering that extends from head to toe, revealing only hands and face. A rifle divides her face, upon which Neshat has inscribed in ink a Farsi poem by the devout Iranian woman poet Tahereh Saffarzadeh. Saffarzadeh's verses express the deep belief of many Iranian women in Islam.

Milhazes's work

dependent on understanding its cultural context ancient sculpture of the Greek god Apollo and a carved mask from the Sang tribe of Gabon in West Africa

How can the subject matter of Shirin Neshat's Rebellious Silence be distinguished from its content?

it depicts a Muslim woman in a black chador, a rifledividing, and Farsi text inscribed over her face

George Green's

painted in a distinct style that came to be known as Abstract Illusionism. It was characterized by images of abstract sculptural forms that seemed to float free of the painting's surface in highly illusionistic three-dimensional space. In the last few years of the 1990s, he began to make these paintings on birch, using the wood's natural grain to heighten the illusion, so that it is as if one were looking at a photorealistic painting of an abstract wooden sculpture.

Albert Bierstadt's painting Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast

s representational and, from all appearances, highly realistic. However, even when it was painted in 1870, a writer for the New York Evening Mail, reporting on his visit to Bierstadt's studio to see the work, worried that it might be more fanciful than realistic: