HistArt Final Art work

Kathe Kollwitz Woman with a dead child 1903

A seated, cross-legged, naked woman envelops the body of a child. The limp child, head tipped far back, is clutched to the figure we assume is the mother. Her features are mostly hidden by the child's body--except we see one closed eye and her nose nestled into his skin. Also visible are her expressive eyebrows, which silently communicate her explosive feelings. With her strong arms--especially a strong, thick hand--she draws the child toward her even more tightly. Her embrace is all-consuming. The mother's muscular leg forms the base of the monolithic shape that confronts the viewer. Most of the lines the artist uses to shape and shade the forms are aggressive, taut, and meaningful, contributing energy to the surface. As a bit of relief from the overall grief, Kollwitz drew the lines of the woman's hair tenderly, and delicately rendered the boy's features. Beate Bonus-Jeep, Kollwitz's close friend, described this etching memorably: "A mother, animal-like, naked, the light-colored corpse of her dead child between her thigh bones and arms, seeks with her eyes, with her lips, with her breath, to swallow back into herself the disappearing life that once belonged to her womb." (Prelinger, p. 42) This etching is one of a series of drawings, charcoals, and etchings titled "Woman with Dead Child," all produced in 1903. Kollwitz began the series with works she called "Pieta"--Mary mourning her dead son. These first studies quickly evolved into a group of etchings without any theological references, simply of a woman with dead child, and called by Elizabeth Prelinger "perhaps the strongest image Kollwitz ever made." (pp. 40-42)Bonus-Jeep, who had not seen Kollwitz for some time, was confounded when she saw this etching at an exhibition. Concerned that something had happened to Kollwitz's young son Peter, she speculated, "Can something have happened with little Peter that she could make something so dreadful?" Reflecting later, she concluded that Kollwitz was "someone to whom it is given to reach beneath the ultimate veils." (Prelinger, p. 42)The subject Kollwitz focused on, the mother mourning for the dead child, is not based on any direct life experience: "Great piercing sorrows have not struck me yet" she wrote in her diary (The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1988), but she was not to escape "great piercing sorrows" much longer. Her son Peter, who at age seven posed for the dead child in this etching, was killed in World War I at the age of twenty-one and a grandson Peter was killed in World War II.Note: The quoted words of Bonus-Jeep are footnoted in Prelinger: "cited from Catherine Krahmer, Kathe Kollwitz (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1981), p. 56.

Courbet The Stonebreakers 1850

If we look closely at Courbet's painting The Stonebreakers of 1849 (painted only one year after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their influential pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto) the artist's concern for the plight of the poor is evident. Here, two figures labor to break and remove stone from a road that is being built. In our age of powerful jackhammers and bulldozers, such work is reserved as punishment for chain-gangs. Unlike Millet, who, in paintings like The Gleaners, was known for depicting hard-working, but idealized peasants, Courbet depicts figures who wear ripped and tattered clothing. And unlike the aerial perspective Millet used in The Gleaners to bring our eye deep into the French countryside during the harvest, the two stone breakers in Courbet's painting are set against a low hill of the sort common in the rural French town of Ornans, where the artist had been raised and continued to spend a much of his time. The hill reaches to the top of the canvas everywhere but the upper right corner, where a tiny patch of bright blue sky appears. The effect is to isolate these laborers, and to suggest that they are physically and economically trapped. In Millet's painting, the gleaners' rounded backs echo one another, creating a composition that feels unified, where Courbet's figures seem disjointed. Millet's painting, for all its sympathy for these poor figures, could still be read as "art" by viewers at an exhibition in Paris. Courbet wants to show what is "real," and so he has depicted a man that seems too old and a boy that seems still too young for such back-breaking labor. This is not meant to be heroic: it is meant to be an accurate account of the abuse and deprivation that was a common feature of mid-century French rural life. And as with so many great works of art, there is a close affiliation between the narrative and the formal choices made by the painter, meaning elements such as brushwork, composition, line, and color. Like the stones themselves, Courbet's brushwork is rough—more so than might be expected during the mid-nineteenth century. This suggests that the way the artist painted his canvas was in part a conscious rejection of the highly polished, refined Neoclassicist style that still dominated French art in 1848. Perhaps most characteristic of Courbet's style is his refusal to focus on the parts of the image that would usually receive the most attention. Traditionally, an artist would spend the most time on the hands, faces, and foregrounds. Not Courbet. If you look carefully, you will notice that he attempts to be even-handed, attending to faces and rock equally. In these ways, The Stonebreakers seems to lack the basics of art (things like a composition that selects and organizes, aerial perspective and finish) and as a result, it feels more "real."

Paul Cézanne Basket of Apples 1890-94

In David's Neo-Classical era, still life was considered the least important subject type. Only minor artists bothered with what was then seen as the most purely decorative and trivial of painting subjects. The hierarchy of subjects went roughly from the most important—historical and religious themes (often very large in scale); to important—portraiture (usually of moderate scale); less important—landscape & genre (themes of common life, usually of modest scale); to least important— still life (generally small canvases). There had been one significant historical exception. In the 17th century in Northern Europe and particularly in the Netherlands, still life blossomed. But this period was brief and had little impact in France other than in the work of Chardin. So why would Cézanne turn so often to this discredited subject? It was the very fact that still life was so neglected that seems to have attracted Cézanne to it. So outmoded was the iconography (symbolic forms and references) in still life that this rather hopeless subject was freed of virtually all convention. Here was a subject that offered extraordinary freedom, a blank slate that gave Cézanne the opportunity to invent meaning unfettered by tradition. And Cézanne would almost single-handedly revive the subject of still life making it an important subject for Picasso, Matisse, and others in the 20th century. The image at the top of this page looks simple enough, a wine bottle, a basket tipped up to expose a bounty of fruit inside, a plate of what are perhaps stacked cookies or small rolls, and a tablecloth both gathered and draped. Nothing remarkable, at least not until one begins to notice the odd errors in drawing. Look, for instance, at the lines that represent the close and far edge of the table. I remember an old student of mine remarking to the class, "I would never hire him as a carpenter!" What she had noticed was the odd stepping of a line that we expect to be straight. But that is not all that is wrong. The table seems to be too steeply tipped at the left, so much so that the fruit is in danger of rolling off it. The bottle looks tipsy and the cookies are very odd indeed. The cookies stacked below the top layer seem as if they are viewed from the side, but at the same moment, the two on top seem to pop upward as if we were looking down at them. This is an important key to understanding the questions that we've raised about Cézanne's pictures so far. Like Edouard Manet, from whom he borrowed so much, Cézanne was prompted to rethink the value of the various illusionistic techniques that he had inherited from the masters of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. This was due in part to the growing impact of photography and its transformation of modern representation. While Degas and Monet borrowed from the camera the fragmenting of time, Cézanne saw this mechanized segmentation of time as artificial and at odds with the perception of the human eye. By Cézanne's era, the camera did shatter time into fragments as do non-digital cameras that can be set so that the shutter is open to light for only 1/1000 of a second. Cézanne pushed this distinction between the vision of the camera and of human vision. He reasoned that the same issues applied to the illusionism of the old masters, of Raphael, Leonardo, Caravaggio, etc. For instance, think about how linear perspective works. Since the Early Renaissance, constructing the illusion of space required that the artist remain frozen in a single point in space in order maintain consistent recession among all receding orthogonals. This frozen vantage point belongs to both the artist and then the viewer. But is it a full description of the the experience of human sight? Cézanne's still life suggests that it is not. If a Renaissance painter set out to render Cézanne's still life objects (not that they would, mind you), that artist would have placed himself in a specific point before the table and taken great pains to render the collection of tabletop objects only from that original perspective. Every orthogonal line would remain consistent (and straight). But this is clearly not what Cézanne had in mind. His perspective seems jumbled. When we first look carefully, it may appear as if he was simply unable to draw, but if you spend more time, it may occur to you that Cézanne is, in fact, drawing carefully, although according to a new set of rules. Seemingly simple, Cézanne's concern with representing the true experience of sight had enormous implications for 20th century visual culture. Cézanne realized that unlike the fairly simple and static Renaissance vision of space, people actually see in a fashion that is more complex, we see through both time and space. In other words, we move as we see. In contemporary terms, one might say that human vision is less like the frozen vision of a still camera and more akin to the continuous vision of a video camera except that he worked with oil on canvas which dries and becomes static. So very tentatively, Cézanne began the purposeful destruction of the unified image. Look again at the cookies, or whatever they are, stacked upon the plate in the upper right. Is it possible that the gentle disagreements that we noted result from the representation of two slightly different view points? These are not large ruptures, but rather, they suggest careful and tentative discovery. It is as if Cézanne had simply depicted the bottom cookies as he looked across at them and then as he looked more slightly down at the top cookies after shifting his weight to his forward leg. Furthermore, I'm not sure that he was all that proud of these breaks that allow for more than a single perspective. Look, for instance, at the points where the table must break to express these multiple perspectives and you will notice that they are each hidden from view. Nevertheless, in doing this, Cézanne changed the direction of painting.

Van Gogh Starry Night 1889

The curving, swirling lines of hills, mountains, and sky, the brilliantly contrasting blues and yellows, the large, flame-like cypress trees, and the thickly layered brushstrokes of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night are engrained in the minds of many as an expression of the artist's turbulent state-of-mind. Van Gogh's canvas is indeed an exceptional work of art, not only in terms of its quality but also within the artist's oeuvre, since in comparison to favored subjects like irises, sunflowers, or wheat fields, night landscapes are rare. Nevertheless, it is surprising that The Starry Night has become so well known. Van Gogh mentioned it briefly in his letters as a simple "study of night" or "night effect." His brother Theo, manager of a Parisian art gallery and a gifted connoisseur of contemporary art, was unimpressed, telling Vincent, "I clearly sense what preoccupies you in the new canvases like the village in the moonlight... but I feel that the search for style takes away the real sentiment of things" (813, 22 October 1889). Although Theo Van Gogh felt that the painting ultimately pushed style too far at the expense of true emotive substance, the work has become iconic of individualized expression in modern landscape painting. Van Gogh had had the subject of a blue night sky dotted with yellow stars in mind for many months before he painted The Starry Night in late June or early July of 1889. It presented a few technical challenges he wished to confront—namely the use of contrasting color and the complications of painting en plein air (outdoors) at night—and he referenced it repeatedly in letters to family and friends as a promising if problematic theme. "A starry sky, for example, well - it's a thing that I'd like to try to do," Van Gogh confessed to the painter Emile Bernard in the spring of 1888, "but how to arrive at that unless I decide to work at home and from the imagination?" (596, 12 April 1888). As an artist devoted to working whenever possible from prints and illustrations or outside in front of the landscape he was depicting, the idea of painting an invented scene from imagination troubled Van Gogh. When he did paint a first example of the full night sky in Starry Night over the Rhône (1888, oil on canvas, 72.5 x 92 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), an image of the French city of Arles at night, the work was completed outdoors with the help of gas lamplight, but evidence suggests that his second Starry Night was created largely if not exclusively in the studio. Following the dramatic end to his short-lived collaboration with the painter Paul Gauguin in Arles in 1888 and the infamous breakdown during which he mutilated part of his own ear, Van Gogh was ultimately hospitalized at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, an asylum and clinic for the mentally ill near the village of Saint-Rémy. During his convalescence there, Van Gogh was encouraged to paint, though he rarely ventured more than a few hundred yards from the asylum's walls. Besides his private room, from which he had a sweeping view of the mountain range of the Alpilles, he was also given a small studio for painting. Since this room did not look out upon the mountains but rather had a view of the asylum's garden, it is assumed that Van Gogh composed The Starry Night using elements of a few previously completed works still stored in his studio, as well as aspects from imagination and memory. It has even been argued that the church's spire in the village is somehow more Dutch in character and must have been painted as an amalgamation of several different church spires that Van Gogh had depicted years earlier while living in the Netherlands. Van Gogh also understood the painting to be an exercise in deliberate stylization, telling his brother, "These are exaggerations from the point of view of arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of ancient woodcuts" (805, c. 20 September 1889). Similar to his friends Bernard and Gauguin, Van Gogh was experimenting with a style inspired in part by medieval woodcuts, with their thick outlines and simplified forms. On the other hand, The Starry Night evidences Van Gogh's extended observation of the night sky. After leaving Paris for more rural areas in southern France, Van Gogh was able to spend hours contemplating the stars without interference from gas or electric city street lights, which were increasingly in use by the late nineteenth century. "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big" 777, c. 31 May - 6 June 1889). As he wrote to his sister Willemien van Gogh from Arles, "It often seems to me that the night is even more richly colored than the day, colored with the most intense violets, blues and greens. If you look carefully, you'll see that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow. And without labouring the point, it's clear to paint a starry sky it's not nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black.(678, 14 September 1888)" Van Gogh followed his own advice, and his canvas demonstrates the wide variety of colors he perceived on clear nights. Arguably, it is this rich mixture of invention, remembrance, and observation combined with Van Gogh's use of simplified forms, thick impasto, and boldly contrasting colors that has made the work so compelling to subsequent generations of viewers as well as to other artists. Inspiring and encouraging others is precisely what Van Gogh sought to achieve with his night scenes. When Starry Night over the Rhône was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, an important and influential venue for vanguard artists in Paris, in 1889, Vincent told Theo he hoped that it "might give others the idea of doing night effects better than I do." The Starry Night, his own subsequent "night effect," became a foundational image for Expressionism as well as perhaps the most famous painting in Van Gogh's oeuvre.

Andy Warhol Marilyn in Gold 1962

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/pop/v/warhol-gold-marilyn-monroe-1962

Claes Oldenburg Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar tracks 1969

A monumental tube of lipstick sprouting from a military vehicle appeared, uninvited, on the campus of Yale University amidst the 1969 student protests against the Vietnam War. While the sculpture may have seemed like a playful, if elaborate artistic joke, Claes Oldenburg's Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks was also deeply critical. Oldenburg made the 24-foot-high sculpture in collaboration with architecture students at his alma mater and then surreptitiously delivered it to Yale's Beinecke Plaza. In Beinecke Plaza, the sculpture overlooked both the office of Yale's president and a prominent World War I memorial. Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks claimed a visible space for the anti-war movement while also poking fun at the solemnity of the plaza. The sculpture served as a stage and backdrop for several subsequent student protests. Oldenburg and the architecture students never intended for the original Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks sculpture to be permanent. They made the base of plywood, and the red vinyl tip of the lipstick could be comically inflated and deflated—although the balloon mechanism didn't always work. The original remained in Beinecke Plaza for ten months before Oldenburg removed it in order to remake the form in metal. The resulting sculpture was placed in a less-prominent spot on Yale's campus, where it remains to this day. Oldenburg had experimented with lipstick forms earlier in the 1960s, pasting catalog images of lipstick onto postcards of London's Picadilly Circus. The resulting collages showed lipstick tubes looming like massive pillars over Picadilly's plaza. In the Yale sculpture, the artist combined the highly "feminine" product with the "masculine" machinery of war. In doing so, he playfully critiqued both the hawkish, hyper-masculine rhetoric of the military and the blatant consumerism of the United States. In addition to its feminine associations, the large lipstick tube is phallic and bullet-like, making the benign beauty product seem masculine or even violent. The juxtaposition implied that the U.S. obsession with beauty and consumption both fueled and distracted from the ongoing violence in Vietnam. Oldenburg had been designing large-scale, vinyl versions of household objects since his Green Gallery exhibition in 1962. He had created collages and drawings that played with the notion of massive domestic objects in public places, but Lipstick was his first large-scale public artwork. Oldenburg went on to make several other public sculptures that enlarged everyday domestic items to monumental dimensions. For example, he rendered a clothespin on the scale of an ancient Egyptian obelisk in a 1976 sculpture for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By bringing both domestic and military objects into a public space, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks blurred the lines between public and private, and between the war in Vietnam and culture of the United States. In doing so, it upheld Oldenburg's 1961 declaration that "I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum [...] I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary [...]."

Vincent Van Gogh

- "Mad genius" persona - Dutch - Wanted to be a minister - No formal artistic training

Mondrian Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow 1930

Walking up to Piet Mondrian's painting, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow can be a baffling experience (see image above). The canvas is small and uses only the simplest of colors: red, blue, yellow, white and black. The composition is similarly reduced to the simplest of rectilinear forms, squares and rectangles defined by vertical and horizontal lines. One would hardly suspect that we are seeing the artist's determination to depict the underlying structure of reality. Mondrian called his style Neo-Plasticism or "The New Plastic Painting," the title of his famous 1917 essay promoting abstraction for the expression of modern life. Don't be confused by Mondrian's use of the term "plastic." He uses it to refer to the plastic arts—media such as sculpture, that molds three-dimensional form, or, in Mondrian's case, painting on canvas. For centuries, European painters had attempted to render three-dimensional forms in believable spaces—creating convincing illusions of reality. See for an example—Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (below). In contrast, Mondrian and other modernists wanted to move painting beyond naturalistic depiction to focus instead on the material properties of paint and its unique ability to express ideas abstractly using formal elements such as line and color. Mondrian believed his abstraction could serve as a universal pictorial language representing the dynamic, evolutionary forces that govern nature and human experience. In fact, he believed that abstraction provides a truer picture of reality than illusionistic depictions of objects in the visible world. Perhaps this is why Mondrian characterized his style as "abstract real" painting. Mondrian's earliest paintings were quite traditional in both subject and style. He studied at the art academies in the Hague and in Amsterdam in his home country of the Netherlands. Then, as with many artists during the early twentieth century, he began to emulate a variety of contemporary styles, including Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Symbolism in an effort to find his own artistic voice. The impact of these modern movements can be seen in the development of Mondrian's painting which, over time, shows the dissolution of recognizable objects into increasingly pared-down structures (see the three depictions of trees below). His emphasis on line, color, and geometric shape sought to highlight formal characteristics. Mondrian was inspired by Cubism, a movement led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque that explored the use of multiple perspectives. Mondrian began experimenting with abstracted forms around the time he moved to Paris in 1912. His famous "Pier and Ocean" series (see above), which reduces the landscape to arrangements of vertical and horizontal lines, exemplifies this period in Mondrian's career. He wanted to push beyond Cubism's strategy of fragmenting forms (café tables were a favorite subject), and move toward pure abstraction. However, this change in Mondrian's process did not take place overnight and he continued to work in a studied, methodical way. In fact, his production of paintings within a series of canvases was part of Mondrian's method, and how he worked through thematic and compositional issues. Because Mondrian continued to rely on the series throughout his career, we can see the progression of his pictorial language even in his later, purely abstract work. His use of the term "composition" (the organization of forms on the canvas) signals his experimentation with abstract arrangements. Mondrian had returned home to the Netherlands just prior to the outbreak of the First World War and would remain there until the war ended. While in the Netherlands he further developed his style, ruling out compositions that were either too static or too dynamic, concluding that asymmetrical arrangements of geometric (rather than organic) shapes in primary (rather than secondary) colors best represent universal forces. Moreover, he combined his development of an abstract style with his interest in philosophy, spirituality, and his belief that the evolution of abstraction was a sign of humanity's progress. Some art historians have viewed Mondrian's painting as an expression of his interest in dialectical relationships, ideas advanced by the early nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel that art and civilization progress by successive moments of tension and reconciliation between oppositional forces. For Mondrian then, composing with opposites such as black and white pigments or vertical and horizontal lines suggest an evolutionary development. Mondrian's painting may also reflect his association with the Theosophical Society, an esoteric group that had a strong presence in Europe. Theosophists were interested in opposites as an expression of hidden unity. During WWI, Mondrian stayed in Laren, a village with a thriving art community near Amsterdam. He lived near M.H.J. Schoenmaeker, a prominent Theosophist who used terms such as "New Plastic" to promote his ideas on spiritual evolution and the unification of the real and the ideal, the physical and immaterial. In Theosophy, lines, shapes, and colors symbolized the unity of spiritual and natural forces. While in Holland, Mondrian founded the movement called De Stijl (The Style) with the artist Theo van Doesburg. The two shared many ideas about art as an expression of relationships, particularly the relationships between art and life. Because these artists believed that the evolution of art coincided with the modern progression of humankind, they thought that New Plasticism could, and should, encompass all of human experience. Van Doesburg founded the journal De Stijl to promote these ideas and demonstrate that their geometric abstraction, based on their theory of spiritual and pictorial progress, could form a total environment, and impact modern life. Although Mondrian and van Doesburg eventually parted ways, their movement to combine modern art and living was so influential that the abstract, geometric principles and use of primary colors they applied in painting, sculpture, design, and architecture still resonate today. Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow demonstrates his commitment to relational opposites, asymmetry, and pure planes of color. Mondrian composed this painting as a harmony of contrasts that signify both balance and the tension of dynamic forces. Mondrian viewed his black lines not as outlines but as planes of pigment in their own right; an idea seen in the horizontal black plane on the lower right of the painting that stops just short of the canvas edge (see image above). Mondrian eradicates the entire notion of illusionistic depth predicated on a figure in front of a background. He achieves a harmonious tension by his asymmetrical placement of primary colors that balance the blocks of white paint. Notice how the large red square at the upper right, which might otherwise dominate the composition, is balanced by the small blue square at the bottom left. What's more, when you see this painting in a person you can discern just how much variation is possible using this color scheme—and that Mondrian used varying shades of blacks and whites, some of which are subtly lighter or darker. Seen up close, this variety of values and textures create a surprising harmony of contrasts. Even the visible traces of the artist's brushwork counter what might otherwise be a rigid geometric composition and balance the artist's desire for a universal truth with the intimately personal experience of the artist.

Marina Abramovic Rhythm 0 1974

https://vimeo.com/71952791

Jacques-Louis David Oath of the Horatii 1785

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/enlightenment-revolution/v/david-oath-of-the-horatii-1784

Joseph Mallord William (J.M.W.) Turner, The Slave Ship 1840

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/enlightenment-revolution/v/turner-slave-ship-slavers-throwing-overboard-the-dead-and-dying-typhoon-coming-on-1840

Kandinsky Improvisation 28 1912

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/modernity-ap/v/kandinsky-improv28

Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1917

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/modernity-ap/v/marcel-duchamp-fountain-1917

Anne-Louis Girodet The Deluge 1806

https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/your-collection/at-the-ngc/expressive-and-refined-study-for-a-flood-scene-by-anne-louis The career of the French painter Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824) was launched in 1789, when the artist won the prestigious Prix de Rome, awarded by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, for his painting Joseph recognized by his brothers (Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Art). During his Italian sojourn from 1790 to 1795, he drew extensively from the Antique and made several landscape paintings. It was while in Italy, that in 1791 he produced The Sleep of Endymion, which established his reputation when it was shown at the Salon of 1793. A student of the great French master Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), who until then considered him to be his most talented and promising follower, the young Girodet soon adopted a pre-Romantic approach, turning his back on his neoclassical training. Upon his return to Paris, despite being already known for his portraits, he preferred more elaborate subjects and avoided commissions whenever possible. Striving constantly for originality, he created a vast canvas titled A Flood Scene, a depiction of a flood rather than the biblical Flood. Striking both in terms of its monumental scale and its dramatic and terrifying image, the work caused a sensation at the Salon of 1806: "Today, at the opening of the Salon, all eyes were drawn to a scene of the Flood [sic] by Girodet. This fine composition was widely admired," wrote one critic in the Gazette de France, while the Journal de l'Empire confirmed: "We were waiting with something like impatience for Mr. Girodet to produce a work that would leave the harshest connoisseurs in no doubt as to the assurance and supremacy of his talent." Measuring 441 × 341 cm, the monumental painting was exhibited again at the Salon of 1814 and then purchased by the king's household in 1818 for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. After Girodet's death, the work was transferred to the Louvre, along with its predecessor The Sleep of Endymion and its successor The Entombment of Atala (1808). A preparatory drawing for A Flood Scene, recently acquired by the National Gallery of Canada, is a key study for Girodet's masterpiece. The drawing, as well as a number of other sheets and painted sketches (some located, others documented) allow us to trace the development of the painting. Evidence that Girodet was already interested in the subject in 1789 is provided by a sketchbook, now in Montargis, which includes a graphite drawing by the artist of The Flood painted that year by Jean-Baptiste Regnault (1754-1829). Six years later, in 1795 in Genoa he began laying down his own ideas in two Italian sketchbooks for a work on the theme, making no reference to the biblical narrative. The acquired study can likely be placed somewhere between the copy after Regnault and these two original images, for despite its more finished quality it was undoubtedly a primo pensiero (an initial idea), more neoclassical and less romantic in style than the later ones, in which the composition was gradually transformed. Although the artist would produce numerous figural studies, this recently rediscovered drawing is one of only three compositional sketches for the Louvre painting, which Girodet ultimately executed between 1802 and 1806. Still horizontal rather than vertical, this early version does not comprise the tree nor the older child clinging to his mother's neck in the painting. Instead, a dog accompanies the group and the drapery effects are less dramatic. The drawing is an excellent example of the classical style employed by the artist who is better known as a pioneer of Romanticism, it is also the only preparatory sketch for A Flood Scene outside France—all others belong to French public institutions. The collection of the National Gallery of Canada includes three works by Girodet: the oil portrait of Madame Erneste Bioche de Misery and two drawings. One is a sparely drawn, neoclassical illustration of Juno and Venus, made for a contemporary edition of Virgil's Aeneid. Not unlike the newly-acquired study, the latter is a preparatory sketch for another celebrated painting by Girodet now in the Louvre, The Entombment of Atala mentioned earlier. Like the Study for "A Flood Scene", the two preparatory sketches (one in ink, the other in black chalk) for landmark works by Girodet, that have been kept at the Louvre since the artist's death, are significant not only for their powerful aesthetics but also for how they document the evolution of complex and ingenious compositions.

Hilma of Klint Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood 1907

https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/group-iv-the-ten-largest-no-7-adulthood-1907-by-hilma-af-klint When Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) began creating radically abstract paintings in 1906, they were like little that had been seen before: bold, colorful, and untethered from any recognizable references to the physical world. It was several years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would take similar strides to free their own artwork of representational content. Yet af Klint rarely exhibited her groundbreaking paintings and, convinced the world was not ready for them, stipulated that they not be shown for twenty years following her death. Ultimately, her abstractions remained all but unseen until 1986. Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum October 12, 2018-April 23, 2019, is the first major solo exhibition in the United States devoted to the artist, who imagined installing her works in a spiral temple. Throughout her adult life, Hilma af Klint practiced a kind of transcendental spiritualism. This religious movement flourished in Europe and America, especially in literary and artistic circles, at the turn of the 20th century. It is based on the belief that spirits can communicate with the living. These communications were often pursued through séances, meetings in which people gathered to receive messages, whether directly or relayed through a medium, from the dead or other kinds of spirits. Af Klint started participating in séances as a teenager, in 1879. During one such séance in 1906, the artist, who was 43 years old at the time, reported receiving a commission from a higher being. She claimed she had been asked to make paintings on a transcendent plane, which would one day be hung in a nearly circular temple specifically designed to house them. Over the next nine years, af Klint completed what she described as her "great commission" which she referred to as The Paintings for the Temple. This mammoth series of 193 works encompasses several smaller thematic subsets. It includes af Klint's earliest abstract works as well as the paintings on view in this gallery. Af Klint intended this particular group of paintings, titled The Ten Largest, from 1907, to be hung together, much as they are here, in order to create what the artist describes as a "beautiful wall covering." These works represent the stages of life, and start in childhood, and move through life up to adulthood, and then to old age. They combine elements of imagery that's derived from organic forms, and botanicals, and creatures, and objects that one observes in the real world. So, there are representational elements to them. But they also take off into fantastical realms. Af Klint wrote the following in a notebook about the instructions that she received for making this group of paintings: "It was not the case that I was to blindly obey the High Lords of the mysteries but that I was to imagine that they were always standing by my side. She also wrote: "Ten paradisiacally beautiful paintings were to be executed; the paintings were to be in colors that would be educational and they would reveal my feelings to me in an economical way.... It was the meaning of the leaders to give the world a glimpse of the system of four parts in the life of man. As af Klint continued to make The Paintings for the Temple, her imagery became imbued with increasingly complex meaning. With each new series or group of works, the artist layered recurring motifs with new forms and subjects, while exploring formal and conceptual conventions of art making, such as color, scale, balance, and edge.

Francisco Goya Third of May, 1808 1814

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/introduction-ap-arthistory/v/goya-third-may In 1807, Napoleon, bent on conquering the world, brought Spain's king, Charles IV, into alliance with him in order to conquer Portugal. Napoleon's troops poured into Spain, supposedly just passing through. But Napoleon's real intentions soon became clear: the alliance was a trick. The French were taking over. Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, was the new king of Spain. On May 2, 1808, hundreds of Spaniards rebelled. On May 3, these Spanish freedom fighters were rounded up and massacred by the French. Their blood literally ran through the streets of Madrid. Even though Goya had shown French sympathies in the past, the slaughter of his countrymen and the horrors of war made a profound impression on the artist. He commemorated both days of this gruesome uprising in paintings. Although Goya's Second of May (above) is a tour de force of twisting bodies and charging horses reminiscent of Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari, his The Third of May, 1808 in Madrid is acclaimed as one of the great paintings of all time, and has even been called the world's first modern painting. We see row of French soldiers aiming their guns at a Spanish man, who stretches out his arms in submission both to the men and to his fate. A country hill behind him takes the place of an executioner's wall. A pile of dead bodies lies at his feet, streaming blood. To his other side, a line of Spanish rebels stretches endlessly into the landscape. They cover their eyes to avoid watching the death that they know awaits them. The city and civilization is far behind them. Even a monk, bowed in prayer, will soon be among the dead. Goya's painting has been lauded for its brilliant transformation of Christian iconography and its poignant portrayal of man's inhumanity to man. The central figure of the painting, who is clearly a poor laborer, takes the place of the crucified Christ; he is sacrificing himself for the good of his nation. The lantern that sits between him and the firing squad is the only source of light in the painting, and dazzlingly illuminates his body, bathing him in what can be perceived as spiritual light. His expressive face, which shows an emotion of anguish that is more sad than terrified, echoes Christ's prayer on the cross, "Forgive them Father, they know not what they do." Close inspection of the victim's right hand also shows stigmata, referencing the marks made on Christ's body during the Crucifixion. The man's pose not only equates him with Christ, but also acts as an assertion of his humanity. The French soldiers, by contrast, become mechanical or insect-like. They merge into one faceless, many-legged creature incapable of feeling human emotion. Nothing is going to stop them from murdering this man. The deep recession into space seems to imply that this type of brutality will never end. This depiction of warfare was a drastic departure from convention. In 18th century art, battle and death was represented as a bloodless affair with little emotional impact. Even the great French Romanticists were more concerned with producing a beautiful canvas in the tradition of history paintings, showing the hero in the heroic act, than with creating emotional impact. Goya's painting, by contrast, presents us with an anti-hero, imbued with true pathos that had not been seen since, perhaps, the ancient Roman sculpture of The Dying Gaul. Goya's central figure is not perishing heroically in battle, but rather being killed on the side of the road like an animal. Both the landscape and the dress of the men are nondescript, making the painting timeless. This is certainly why the work remains emotionally charged today. Future artists also admired The Third of May, 1808 in Madrid, and both Manet and Picasso used it for inspiration in their own portrayals of political murders (Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian and Picasso's Massacre in Korea). Along with Picasso's Guernica, Goya's Third of May remains one of the most chilling images ever created of the atrocities of war, and it is difficult to imagine how much more powerful it must have been in the pre-photographic era, before people were bombarded with images of warfare in the media. A powerful anti-war statement, Goya is not only criticizing the nations that wage war on one another, but is also admonishing us, the viewers, for being complicit in acts of violence, which occur not between abstract entities like "countries," but between human beings standing a few feet away from one another.

Manet Olympia 1865

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/modernity-ap/v/manet-olympia-1863-exhibited-1865 Manet's complaint to his friend Charles Baudelaire pointed to the overwhelming negative response his painting Olympia received from critics in 1865. An art critic himself, Baudelaire had advocated for an art that could capture the "gait, glance, and gesture" of modern life, and, although Manet's painting had perhaps done just that, its debut at the salon only served to bewilder and scandalize the Parisian public. 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. 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. It was for this reason Manet is often referred to as the father of Impressionism. The Impressionists, who formed as a group around 1871, took on the mantle of Manet's rebel status (going so far as to arrange their own exhibitions instead of submitting to the Salon juries), and they pushed his expressive brushwork to the point where everything dissolved into the shimmering movement of light and formlessness. The 20th century art critic Clement Greenberg would later declare Manet's paintings to be the first truly modernist works because of the "frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted." Manet had an immediate predecessor in the Realist paintings of Gustave Courbet, who had himself scandalized the Salons during the 1840s and '50s with roughly worked images of the rural French countryside and its inhabitants. In rejecting a tightly controlled application of paint and seamless illusionism—what the Impressionists called the "licked surfaces" of the paintings of the French Academy—Manet also drew inspiration from Spanish artists Velasquez and Goya, as well as 17th century Dutch painters like Frans Hals, whose loosely executed portraits seem as equally frank about the medium as Manet's some 200 years later. But Manet's modernity is not just a function of how he painted, but also what he painted. His paintings were pictures of modernity, of the often-marginalized figures that existed on the outskirts of bourgeois normalcy (bourgeois refers here to the French middle class or the social class just below the aristocracy). Many viewers believed the woman at the center of Olympia to be an actual prostitute, coldly staring at them while receiving a gift of flowers from an assumed client, who hovers just out of sight (Manet here puns on the way French prostitutes often borrowed names of classical goddesses). The model for the painting was actually a salon painter in her own right, a certain Victorine Meurent, who appears again in Manet's The Railway (1873) and Auguste Renoir's Moulin de la Galette (1876). Manet had created an artistic revolution: a contemporary subject depicted in a modern manner. It is hard from a present-day perspective to see what all the fuss was about. Nevertheless, the painting elicited much unease and it is important to remember—in the absence of the profusion of media imagery that exists today—that painting and sculpture in nineteenth-century France served to consolidate identity on both a national and individual level. And here is where the Olympia's subversive role resides. Manet chose not to mollify anxiety about this new modern world of which Paris had become a symbol. For those anxious about class status (many had recently moved to Paris from the countryside), the naked woman in Olympia coldly stared back at the new urban bourgeoisie looking to art to solidify their own sense of identity. Aside from the reference to prostitution—itself a dangerous sign of the emerging margins in the modern city—the painting's inclusion of a black woman tapped into the French colonialist mindset while providing a stark contrast for the whiteness of Olympia. The black woman also served as a powerful emblem of "primitive" sexuality, one of many fictions that aimed to justify colonial views of non-Western societies. If Manet rejected an established approach to painting that valued the timeless and eternal, Olympia served to further embody, for his scandalized viewers, a sense of the modern world as one brimming with uncertainty and newness. Olympia occupies a pivotal moment in art history. Situated on the threshold of the shift from the classical tradition to an industrialized modernity, it is a perfect metaphor of an irretrievably disappearing past and an as yet unknowable future.

Kara Walker

- Born in California, father was a painter and professor - Raised in Georgia, received her MFA at RISD - Explores race, gender, sexuality, and violence

Hilma af Klint

- Born and raised in Sweden - One of the first women to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm - Formed a deep relationship with nature, association with natural forms that inspired her work - Also developed interest in mathematics - Parts of a group of five women who staged seances, discussed philosophical ideas, which af Klint converted into painting

Jean-Michel Basquiat

- Born in Brooklyn, grew up visiting the Brooklyn Museum of Art - Segue into art through spray painting and graffiti - Meteoric rise to Stardom, friendship and colllaboration with Andy Warhol - Launch to fame accompanied by drug addiction and overdosed at 27 - 2017 sale set new record for highest price at auction for an American artist's work

Jackson Pollock

- Born in Cody, Wyoming, but raised in Arizona and California - Became interested in Native American trips - Moved to New York in 1930 - Studied with Thomas Hart Benton, travelled with him around the American west

Marcel Duchamp

- Born in Frace into artistic and culturally active family - Becomes figurehead of Dadaist art, although not directly associated with any Dada groups - Travelled between Paris, New York, and Brazil - One of the most influential artists of modern art by questioning what is art? Who gets to define it?

Piet Mondrian

- Born in Netherlands, died in New York - Major contributor to abstract art, reduces his visual vocabulary to simple geometric elements - Art is highly Utopian, searching for universal values and aesthetics - "Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual...Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man."

Andy Warhol

- Born in Pittsburgh - Initially a commercial illustrator - Artist, director, producer, leading figure in pop art - Set up a few different studios in NYC during his career called "The Factory" - Used his studio as a gathering place

Glenn Ligon

- Born in the Bronx, NY - Exhibiting since 1980s - Explores material culture to reveal the way history of slavery, civil rights movements, and sexual politics inform our understanding of American society - Often appropriates literary text

Edouard Manet

- Consummate Parisian and Bourgeois - Well connected through family and socially - Shied away from career in law and Navy, but did sail to Brazil. Would also travel to Germany, Italy, and Netherlands, and Spain - Studied in studio and museum collections, but didn't go to École - One of the most important figures in modern art, a bridge between Realism and Impressionism

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun

- Daughter of a portraitist and great-great-niece of Charles Le Brun - Well-connected in French society and the art world - Completing professional portraits by her early teens - Admitted to Académie royale in 1783, one of 15 women granted membership between 1648- 1793 - Became premier portraitist of Marie- Antoinette - Travelled throughout Europe and painted portraits for royalty in Austria, Russia, Italy - Completed ~660 portraits and 200 landscapes during her career

Faith Ringgold

- Faith Willi Jones, born in Harlem, NY - Mother was a seamstress and fashion designer - Art activist in the civil-rights movement - Began working in fabrics in 1970s

Claude Monet

- Most famous of the Impressionists - Born in Paris, raised in Le Havre - Independent artistic training, en plein air

Pablo Picasso

- One of the most influential artists and cultural figures of the 20th century, some of the most iconic works of Western art - Born in Malaga, Spain, moved to Paris in the 1900's, lived in France for the rest of his life - Closely connected to Gertrude Stein who introduces him to Matisse, his long-term artistic frenemy/fremesis, seen as the two pioneers of Modern Art - Infamous misogynist

Jacques-Louis Davis

- Premier academic artist of his day - Initially trained with Boucher - Competed for Rome price three times before winning in 1774 - Upon return in 1780, he was accepted as an academician - Trained dozens of artists

Rosa Bonheur

- Raised by parents/father Saint-Simonians - Learned drawing from her art teacher father - Premier anemalière of her day - Probably most-famous female artist of the 19th century - "New Women" Wore pants! - Lesbian with two long-term partners

Gustave Courbet

- Son of wealthy landowner - Raised in eastern French province - Self taught - Radical both artistically and politically

Théodore Géricault Guillotined Heads ca. 1818

Gericault's Guillotined Heads presents a gruesome depiction of death and decay. The female head on the left has pallid white skin and closed eyes, while the male head is depicted with its mouth and eyes open staring vacantly past the viewer. The jagged, rough marks on the neck reveal the brutal and painful death these figures suffered at the guillotine. Here Gericault shows his brilliant mastery of chiaroscuro, seen in the contrasts of dark and light throughout the composition. The loose brushstrokes used to render both the faces and the cloth add to the work's dramatic appeal. Severed limbs and body parts are the most striking subject in Géricault's oeuvre. The five works he created in this style are considered to be studies for the figures he would render in his most famous work, The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819). Always striving for authenticity, the artist actually kept dead body parts of victims of the guillotine in his studio. Gériault's use of horrific subject matter was first and foremost an artistic means of pushing the boundaries, but also the vehicle of a political message. By so clearly depicting the savagery involved in the use of the guillotine and presenting it in such a direct and confrontational way, Géricault is visually speaking out against this barbaric form of punishment which had been used widely during the Bourbon Restoration.

Thomas Cole Falls of the Kaaterskill 1826

Kaaterskill Falls cascades through the center of the painting, while shafts of sunlight illuminate a rocky ledge, framed by red and gold autumnal trees. A single figure, a Native American, stands on top of an outcrop, profiled against the dark caverns in the cliff behind him. The effect feels spontaneous and timeless, capturing the beauty of the scene as a natural resource. Yet, trouble looms. The painting is composed as an inverted triangle: its apex sits at the break of the falls with diagonals along the rising slopes on either side to lead the viewer to the higher falls in the upper right. Beyond this, a dense row of pines stretches along the horizon, along with an anvil-shaped thundercloud that creates a sense of impending doom. Cole revisits a subject that had previously gained him fame with his Kaaterskill Upper Fall, Catskill Mountains (1825), painted after his first visit to the area. The region, known for its natural beauty, was viewed as a kind of natural Eden, yet, at the time of Cole's first visit, railings and a bridge had already been installed for the safety of the many tourists. In his depiction, however, Cole erased these manmade elements and included a Native American (even though the indigenous people had been driven from the area by this time) in an attempt to reverse time and preserve the original landscape for posterity.

Glenn Ligon Untitled 1990

Narrator: I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. Ligon has stenciled the sentence over and over until the words smear and dissolve into abstract patterns. Glenn Ligon: Oil paint wants to spread out and smudge and smear. And after about six months of trying to make perfect letters, I realized that the smudging and smearing and disappearance of the letters was way more interesting than trying to make a perfect letter form. And so the paintings became about that disappearance of language. Narrator: The text comes from writer Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." Hurston describes leaving the protective black community of her childhood at age thirteen and suddenly confronting the issue of race. The painting's illegible words embody her confusion, something Glenn Ligon: I became really fascinated by those sentences that had the word "I" in them—"I feel most colored when I'm thrown against a sharp white background." The use of the word "I" creates a kind of confusion. Is it the "I" of the text that I'm quoting, or is it "I," Glenn Ligon, feel most colored? And so, the confusion between those two things was something I was interested in. Narrator: Ligon's surface here is actually a door. Its human scale is ideal for a text that speaks in the first person, its hard surface suggests Hurston's "sharp white background."

Picasso Woman with Mandolin 1910

The 'Girl with a Mandolin' was painted within the Cubist movement by Pablo Picasso in Paris, 1910. The artwork was one of Picasso's early Analytic Cubist creations. Picasso's ideas lead him to paint the subject as she sat directly in front of him. He analyzed his subject, breaking the subject down into squares, cubes, rectangles, and other geometric shapes along the contours of her form. He arranged these shapes to portray various parts of her form that would otherwise be impossible to see from one point of view, this is what defines an Analytic Cubist painting. Picasso's surroundings were highly influential in his work. This led him to paint everyday life in his locality. Unlike conventional western artworks, before impressionism, whom painted historical subjects that posed to create a pyramid of vector lines that lead to a central focal point of the painting, Cubist developed a new approach to representing their subject that allowed them to use abstract geometric shapes to reconstruct the subjective form. Picasso used an almost monochromatic color palette, dulled and muted forming a unified surface within the work. In orthodox Western artworks, painters would use a wide array of deep colors that were not limited unlike Picasso's work. Traditional paintings would use realistic colors to represent their subjects as realistic forms. Picasso painted the background behind the girl with a random patterns of geometric shapes forming unrecognizable imagery. The background was painted similarly as the subject, it's unspecific as to what shapes and forms are the subject and what forms are the background. However, it is possible to identify the subject as she is painted in lighter tones compared to the background. Picasso allowed the viewer easy identification of the mandolin due to its oval shape and curved lines against the straight lines and geometric forms that accompany the piece. The Cubism movement revolutionized conventional ideas of painting. It opened the door to new styles and artworks. The geometric forms and sharp edges of these artworks characterize a Cubist painting. Picasso's and Baroque's idea was to construct and object rather than represent it that helped form the modernistic art style current today.

Théodore Géricault Study of hands and feet 1818-1819

The theme of Géricault's Study of Feet and Hands is a fragment. Thus his still-life shows broken facets of an event, one that has resulted in the death of the individuals whose severed limbs are arranged here, in a dramatic scenario that unleashes emotional responses. Géricault succeeds in lending the macabre motif a peculiar life of its own. It is as if the painter were concerned to dissolve the boundary between the part and the whole, the dead and the living. There is an air of tenderness in the way in which arm is draped around a foot. The intimate interlacing of a woman's arm and a man's legs may also conceal an element of eroticism. The limbs were possibly painted after living models. Géricault painted fragments of body parts not only as preparatory studies for the greatest of his masterpieces, the Raft of the Medusa (Paris, Louvre); some he painted later as works more or less in a genre of their own: starting from functional oil sketches, he developed them into an autonomous form.

Picasso Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/modernity-ap/v/picasso-les-demoiselles-d-avignon-1907

Caillebotte Paris Street; Rainy Day 1877

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/impressionism/v/gustave-caillebotte-paris-street-rainy-day-1877

Mary Cassatt In the Loge 1878

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/impressionism/v/mary-cassatt-in-the-loge-1878

Renoir Bal du moulin de la Galette 1876

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/impressionism/v/renoir-moulin-de-la-galette-1876

Seurat A Sunday on La Grande Jatte 1884-86

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/post-impressionism/v/georges-seurat-a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte-1884-1884-86

Rosa Bonheaur Ploughing in the Nivernais 1849

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/realism/v/rosa-bonheur-plowing-in-the-nivernais-1849

Théodore Géricault The Raft of the Medusa 1819

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/romanticism-in-france/v/g-ricault-raft-of-the-medusa-1818-19

Caspar David Friedrich Abbey in the Oak Forest 1810

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/romanticism-in-germany/v/caspar-david-friedrich-abbey-among-oak-trees-1809-or-1810

Francisco Goya Saturn Devouring One of His Children 1819-1823

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/romanticism/romanticism-in-spain/v/goya-saturn-devouring-one-of-his-sons

Vigée Le Brun Self-Portait with her daughter Julie 1789

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/monarchy-enlightenment/rococo/v/vige-le-brun-self-portrait-with-daughter-julie

Jackson Pollock Autumn Rhythm 1950

https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/moma/moma-abstract-expressionism/v/moma-jackson-pollock

Roy Lichtenstein Whaam! 1963

https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/tate/global-modernisms/global-pop/v/roy-lichtenstein

Yoko Ono Cut Piece 1965

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yqhSZsXIJQ

Picasso Still Life with Chair Caning 1910-11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E91KmfiUGY

Jean (Hans) Arp Untitled (Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance) 1916-1917

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wm0589mLbM

Monet Impression, Sunrise 1872-73

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uc7EDOhfgw

Chris Burden Shoot 1971

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drZIWs3Dl1k

Matisse "The Joy of Life" 1906

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc_nkpiSodY In 1906, Henri Matisse finished what is often considered his greatest Fauve painting, the Bonheur de Vivre, or the "Joy of Life." It is a large-scale painting depicting an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. The references are many, but in form and date, Bonheur de Vivre is closest to Cézanne's last great image of bathers. Like Cézanne, Matisse constructs the landscape so that it functions as a stage. In both works trees are planted at the sides and in the far distance, and their upper boughs are spread apart like curtains, highlighting the figures lounging beneath. And like Cézanne, Matisse unifies the figures and the landscape. Cézanne does this by stiffening and tilting his trunk-like figures. In Matisse's work, the serpentine arabesques that define the contours of the women are heavily emphasized, and then reiterated in the curvilinear lines of the trees. Matisse creates wildly sensual figures in Bonheur de Vivre, which show how he was clearly informed by Ingres's odalisques and harem fantasies. Additionally, Matisse references Titian. For like Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians, the scene depicted in Bonheur de Vivre is an expression of pure pleasure. Here is a place full of life and love and free from want or fear. Instead of a contemporary scene in a park, on the banks of the Seine, or other recognizable places in nature, Matisse has returned to mythic paradise. But do not be misled by his interest in myth—Matisse is not joining in with Bouguereau or any other Salon artist. This is the epitome of Fauvism, a radical new approach that incorporate purely expressive, bright, clear colors and wildly sensual forms. Matisse's painting s perhaps the first canvas to clearly understand Cézanne's great formal challenge, and to actually further the elder master's ideas. In fact, despite its languid poses, Bonheur de Vivre was regarded as the most radical painting of its day. Because of this, Matisse became known, briefly, as the most daring painter in Paris. So what was daring about this canvas? Here is one key issue: unlike the paintings by Cézanne, Ingres, or Titian, Matisse's work does not depict forms that recede in the background and diminish in scale. If you study the figures in the foreground and the middle ground of Bonheur de Vivre, you will notice that their scale is badly skewed. The shift of scale between the player of the double flute (bottom center) and the smooching couple (bottom right) is plausible, if we take the musician to be a child, but what of the giants just behind them? Compared to the figures standing in the wings, who are obviously mature women (middle ground left), these center women are of enormous proportion. They are simply too big to make sense of within the traditional conventions of Western painting. So why has Matisse done this? How could these shifts of scale make sense? Have we seen anything like this before? Well, in a sense we have. Cézanne's painting ruptured forms in order to accurately explore vision as experienced through time and space—in other words, forms look different depending on where we are in relation to them. In fact, this exploration of vision through space is the key to understanding Matisse's work. By incorporating shifting perspectives, he brought this idea to a grand scale. Put simply, Matisse's shifting scale is actually the result of our changing position vis-à-vis the figures. As a result of his experimentation with perspective, the viewer relates differently to the painting and is required to "enter" the scene. It is only from the varied perspectives within this landscape that the abrupt ruptures of scale make sense. The painting was purchased by a wealthy expatriate American writer-poet named Gertrude Stein and her brother, Leo Stein, who shared a home filled with modern art at 27 Rue de Fleurus, in Paris. This was also the location for Gertrude Stein's weekly salon. Here, Matisse, Apollinaire, the young and largely unknown Picasso and other members of the avant-garde came together to exchange ideas. Stein was able to attract such a crowd not only because of her literary skills but because she often provided financial support to these nearly destitute artists. In fact, the Steins bought Matisse's Bonheur de Vivre soon after its completion and hung it in their dining room for all to see. One person who saw it there was Picasso. By all accounts the painting's fame was too much for the terribly competitive young Spaniard. He determined to out do Matisse, and he did with his 1907 canvas, Demoiselles d'Avignon (MoMA). Picasso turned Matisse's sensuality into violent pornography. Matisse in turn responds to the challenge of what was then called "primitivism" with his own brand of aggression in his Blue Nude.