Introduction to Art Final Review

1917-1950 Ridiculous art; painting dreams and exploring the unconscious

Dada and Surrealism

1780-1850 The triumph of imagination and individualit

Romanticism

Starry Night Artist: Van Gogh Date: 1889 Period: Post-Impressionism

Rooted in imagination and memory, The Starry Night embodies an inner, subjective expression of the artist's response to nature. In thick, sweeping brushstrokes, a flamelike cypress unites the churning sky and the quiet village below. The village was partly invented, and the church spire evokes the artist's native land, the Netherlands.

Number 10 Artist: Pollock Date: 1949 Period: Abstract Expressionism

This artist's drip paintings revolutionized the field of abstract art when they first appeared in 1947. The artist purged his work of all figurative and representational elements. Laying his canvas to the floor and standing over it, he dripped medium from his brush in rhythmic strokes, covering the entire surface in a dense network of interacting forms and gestural lines. The artist's innovation went beyond his handling of the paint—he also used multiple varieties and brands to achieve the complex, multilayered surfaces of his dripped and poured artworks.

Turn in the Road Artist: Paul Cezanne Date: 1881 Period: Post-Impressionism

This bold landscape shows the artist's interest in complex arrangements of shapes and spaces that challenge the viewer's perceptions. In this painting, for example, the curving roadway draws us into deep space and at the same time forms a flattened shape on the surface of the painting.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Artist: Picasso Date: 1907 Period: Cubism

This marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. It depicts five naked women with figures composed of flat, splintered planes and faces inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space the figures inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards; a fiercely pointed slice of melon in the still life of fruit at the bottom of the composition teeters on an impossibly upturned tabletop. These strategies would be significant in the artist's subsequent development of Cubism, charted in this gallery with a selection of the increasingly fragmented compositions he created in this period.

Standing Figure Artist: Picasso Date: 1908 Period: Cubism

This painting of a nude woman with her arms crossed behind her head was created during a key period of invention and experimentation, as the artist began to construct his paintings in a new way. The figure is translated into simplified, geometric forms, reflecting the artist's interest in the art of Africa and Oceania. Using only a few colors, he focuses our attention on the intersection of these forms, linking figure and ground in a dynamic, curving rhythm.

100 Cans of Campbell's Soup Artist: Warhol Date: 1962 Period: Pop Art

Though Campbell's Soup Cans resembles the mass-produced, printed advertisements by which Warhol was inspired, it is hand-painted, while the fleur de lys pattern ringing each can's bottom edge is hand-stamped. In this work, he mimicked the repetition and uniformity of advertising by carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas. He varied only the label on the front of each can, distinguishing them by their variety. Warhol said of Campbell's Soup, "I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again."

Calm Morning Artist: Frank Benson Date: 1904 Period: Boston School ?

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Untitled Artist: Jasper Johns Date: 1984 Period: Pop Art

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1940s-1950s 1960s Post-World War II: pure abstraction and expression without form; popular art absorbs consumerism

Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art

The House Artist: Braque Date: 1908 Period: Cubism

All the sensuous elements of the artist's previous years have been banished; color has been reduced to a severe combination of browns, dull greens and grays...[T]he curving rhythms have given way to a system of verticals and horizontals, broken only by the forty-five degree diagonals of roof-tops and trees. All details have been eliminated and the foliage of the trees reduced to a minimum to reveal the geometric severity of the houses. These are continued upwards almost to the top of the canvas so that the eye is allowed no escape beyond them. The picture plane is further emphasized by the complete lack of aerial perspective (the far houses are, if anything, darker and stronger in value than the foreground house), and by the fact that occasionally contours are broken and forms opened up into each other. There is no central vanishing point; indeed in many of the houses all the canons of traditional perspective are completely broken

1670-1800

American Colonial Art

1905-1920 Pre- and Post- World War 1 art experiments: new forms to express modern life

Cubism, Futurism, Supremativism, Constructivism, De Stijl

Snap the Whip Artist: Homer Date: 1872 Period:

Children embodied innocence and the promise of America's future and were depicted by many artists and writers during the 1870s. Here the artist reminisces about rural simplicity and reflects on the challenges of the complex post-Civil War world.

The Tea Artist: Cassatt Date: 1880 Period: Ex Patriots

Despite these conservative and tasteful surroundings, the artist's painting is a declaration of modernity that demonstrates her rejection of several traditional artistic conventions. . . .

1900-1935 Harsh colors and flat surfaces (Fauvism); emotion distorting form

Fauvism and Expressionism

Three Flags Artist: Johns Date: 1958 Period: Pre-Pop Art

First to rebel against Abstract Expressionism by returning recognizable imagery to art. He described his subjects as "things the mind already knows." In this work, he shifts the visual emphasis from the emblematic significance of the American flag to the geometry of its pattern and the variegated surface of the picture. The artist created the sensuous texture of Three Flags with encaustic paint, a mixture of pigment suspended in warm wax, which congeals shortly after being applied. The three canvases, stacked directly on top of one another and projecting outward, challenge conventional definitions of painting by making the viewer aware of the work as first and foremost an object.

Fountain Artist: Duchamp Date: 1917 Period: Dada

Fountain is one of the artist's most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art.

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Artist: Gauguin Date: 1897-8 Period: Post-Impressionism

He describes the various figures as pondering the questions of human existence given in the title; the blue idol represents "the Beyond." The old woman at the far left, "close to death," accepts her fate with resignation.

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice Artist: Whistler Date: 1879-80 Period: Ex-Patriots

He rejected meticulous representation, preferring instead to paint mood and atmosphere and seeking to express beauty in the line, color, and arrangement of his compositions. The artist explored flattened pictorial space and subtle arrangements of color and shape.

Berlin Street Scene Artist: Kirchner Date: 1915 Period:

Here his sense of rebellion against the confining principles of academic painting and the stifling rules of bourgeois society took a new turn, as the charged atmosphere and energy of the city was felt in an expression of acute perspectives, jagged strokes, dense angular forms, and caustic color. The street life in Berlin, in particular the familiar presence of prostitutes, identified by their elaborate plumed hats, captured the artist's eye and inspired this spectacular series. Shown together for the first time in New York, these works exude the vitality, decadence, and underlying mood of imminent danger that characterized Berlin on the eve of World War I.

Hot Still Scape for Six Colors - 7th Avenue Style Artist: Davis Date: 1940 Period: American Early Modernism

Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style captures the heady, sensory experience of the modern city. One of the undisputed masterpieces of twentieth-century American painting, the image is the visual equivalent of the syncopated rhythms of jazz, an art form also considered both indigenous and new. The artist evokes the energy of both jazz music and city life through his innovative composition of lively shapes and lines and his palette of vibrant color. A month after he finished the picture, he wrote, "It is the product of everyday experience in the new lights, speeds, and spaces of the American environment."

1865-1885 Capturing fleeting effects of natural light

Impressionism

Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle) Artist: Kandinsky Date: 1913 Period:

Improvisation 31 has a less generalized title, Sea Battle, and by taking this hint we can indeed see how he has used the image of two tall ships shooting cannonballs at each other, and abstracted these specifics down into the glorious commotion of the picture. Though it does not show a sea battle, it makes us experience one, with its confusion, courage, excitement, and furious motion. The artist says all this mainly with the color, which bounces and balloons over the center of the picture, roughly curtailed at the upper corners, and ominously smudged at the bottom right. There are also smears, whether of paint or of blood. The action is held tightly within two strong ascending diagonals, creating a central triangle that rises ever higher. This rising accent gives a heroic feel to the violence.

Red Disaster Artist: Warhol Date: 1963 and 1985 Period: Pop Art

In 1962 The artist began reproducing newspaper images in a series of paintings he called Death and Disasters. The images include car wrecks, plane crashes, and, as here, an electric chair. But the series is not about violence so much as the power of the media and the way that, as the artist said, "when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn't have any effect."

Portrait of a Woman Artist: Picasso Date: 1910 Period: Cubism

In austere, monochrome paintings, the artist dissolved the language of pictorial representation into its basic elements of line, light, and shade, creating a subtly shifting grid that animates the entire canvas. The figure merges with the ground, but never entirely vanishes. Such clues as the hair at top left and the long face identify this portrait, while the right angles rising up in the background may represent paintings stacked against the studio wall.

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden Artist: Cole Date: 1828 Period: American Landscape

In his Expulsion, the artist vividly portrays both Paradise and a hostile world replete with the consequences of earthly knowledge. These opposing realms meet near the center of the canvas. The profusion of flora and fauna evokes the beauty and harmony of Eden; outside the portal to Paradise, Adam and Eve are cast into an abyss marked by blasted trees, desolate rocks, and an ominous wolf.

The Green Stripe Artist: Matisse Date: 1905 Period: Fauvism

In his green stripe portrait of his wife, he has used color alone to describe the image. Her oval face is bisected with a slash of green and her coiffure, purpled and top-knotted, juts against a frame of three jostling colors. Her right side repeats the vividness of the intrusive green; on her left, the mauve and orange echo the colors of her dress. This is the artist's version of the dress, his creative essay in harmony. The green stripe down the center of Amélie Matisse's face acts as an artificial shadow line and divides the face in the conventional portraiture style, with a light and a dark side, Matisse divides the face chromatically, with a cool and warm side. The natural light is translated directly into colors and the highly visible brush strokes add to the sense of artistic drama.

Carmelina Artist: Matisse Date: 1903 Period: Fauvism

In this striking early work, the rounded forms of her body, strongly modeled in light and dark, stand out almost in relief against the pattern of rectangular shapes behind her. The subject of the nude, usually relaxed and seductive, here becomes a confrontation between the boldly posed model and the artist, who is visible in the mirror at the back of the studio.

Reeling Nude Artist: Kirchner Date: 1909 Period: Expressionism

Inspired by the intensity of Vincent van Gogh's vision of nature, Paul Gauguin's arbitrary color, and the expressive distortion of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, these young artists and others developed a powerful style now known as German Expressionism. This nude embodies the Expressionist ideal - brilliant, exaggerated color; a deliberate roughness of texture; and the freshness of a sketch retained in the finished work.

1750-1850 Art that recaptures Greco-Roman grace and grandeur

Neoclassical

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit Artist: Sargent Date: 1882 Period: Ex-Patriots

Its unusual format was inspired by the art of both the past and the present, a characteristic approach that the artist employed to make paintings that seemed simultaneously traditional and modern. . .

Monogram Artist: Rauschenberg Date: 1959 Period:

Monogram (1955-59) belongs to the series of Combines that the artist made between 1954 and 1964. The orientation of the Combines challenged the traditional concept of the picture plane as an extension of the viewers space, providing a window into another reality.

Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe Artist: Manet Date: 1862 Period: Realism

One of a number of impressionist paintings works that broke away from the classical view that art should obey established conventions and seek to achieve timelessness.

1885-1910 A soft revolt against impressionism

Post-Impressionism

1970- Art without a center and reworking and mixing past styles

Postmodernism and Deconstructivism

1848-1900 Celebrating working class and peasants; en plein air rustic painting

Realism

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living Artist: Hirst Date: 1991 Period: Conceptual Art

Standing in front of the shark is an alarmingly visceral experience. It evokes a primal response in the viewer: it's natural to experience fear in the face of a predator, and disgust at the sight of a carcass. If the purpose of art is to provoke an emotional response in the viewer, this piece is successful as soon as you enter the room. It's extremely confrontational.

The Third-Class Carriage Artist: Daumier Date: 1864 Period: Genre Art

The artist chronicled the impact of industrialization on modern urban life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Here, he amplifies the subject of a lithograph made some ten years earlier: the hardship and quiet fortitude of third-class railway travelers.

"Whaam" Artist: Lichtenstein Date: 1963 Period: Pop Art

The artist frequently drew on commercial art sources such as comic images or advertisements, attracted by the way highly emotional subject matter could be depicted using detached techniques. Transferring this to a painting context, the artist could present powerfully charged scenes in an impersonal manner, leaving the viewer to decipher meanings for themselves. Although he was careful to retain the character of his source, the artist also explored the formal qualities of commercial imagery and techniques. In these works as in 'Whaam!', he adapted and developed the original composition to produce an intensely stylised painting.

The Persistence of Memory Artist: Dali Date: 1931 Period: Surrealism

The artist rendered his fantastic visions with meticulous verisimilitude, giving the representations of dreams a tangible and credible appearance. In what he called "hand painted dream photographs," hard objects become inexplicably limp, time bends, and metal attracts ants like rotting flesh. The monstrous creature draped across the painting's center resembles the artist's own face in profile; its long eyelashes seem insectlike or even sexual, as does what may or may not be a tongue oozing from its nose like a fat snail.

Woman I Artist: De Kooning Date: 1950 Period: Abstract Expressionism

The artist took an unusually long time to create Woman, I, making numerous preliminary studies and repainting the work repeatedly. The hulking, wild-eyed subject draws upon an amalgam of female archetypes, from Paleolithic fertility goddesses to contemporary pin-up girls. Her threatening stare and ferocious grin are heightened by de Kooning's aggressive brushwork and frantic paint application. Combining voluptuousness and menace, Woman, I reflects the age-old cultural ambivalence between reverence for and fear of the power of the feminine.

Street Singer Artist: Manet Date: 1862 Period: Impressionism

The artist was inspired by the sight of a woman with a guitar emerging from a sleazy café. She refused to pose for the picture, so Manet employed his favorite model of the 1860s, Victorine Meurent. The style and subject matter seemed crude to academic critics when the painting was exhibited in 1863.

Untitled: What big muscles you have Artist: Kruger Date: 1986 Period: Post-modern

The artist's jolting combination of language and image peaks out on political issue like censorship, abortion, domestic violence,and bigotry. The artist splices cropped photographic images with text in an impassioned, punchy, feminist art. The artist's aggressive polemics use a mock-advertising graphic style of blown-up images with confrontational messages that assault the viewer. "I want to speak and hear impertinent questions and rude comments," the artist said. "I want to be on the side of surprise and against the certainties of pictures and property."

The Oxbow Artist: Cole Date: 1835 Period: Hudson River School

The artist's unequivocal construction and composition of the scene, charged with moral significance, is reinforced by his depiction of himself in the middle distance, perched on a promontory painting the Oxbow. He is an American producing American art, in communion with American scenery.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte Artist: Seurat Date: 1886 Period: Pointillism

The artist's use of this highly systematic and "scientific" technique, subsequently called Pointillism, distinguished his art from the more intuitive approach to painting used by the Impressionists.

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Artist: Picasso Date: 1913 Period: Cubism, Futurism

The contours of this marching figure appear to be carved by the forces of wind and speed as it forges ahead. While its wind-swept silhouette is evocative of an ancient statue, the polished metal alludes to the sleek modern machinery beloved by Boccioni and other Futurist artists.

The Little 14-Year-Old Dancer Artist: Degas Date: 1881 Period: Impressionism

The excessive naturalism of the work offended many viewers, but the critic J.-K. Huysmans called it "the only really modern attempt that I know in sculpture."

American Gothic Artist: Wood Date: 1930 Period: Modernism

The highly detailed, polished style and the rigid frontality of the two figures were inspired by Flemish Renaissance art, which The artist studied during his travels to Europe between 1920 and 1926. After returning to settle in Iowa, he became increasingly appreciative of midwestern traditions and culture, which he celebrated in works such as this. American Gothic, often understood as a satirical comment on the midwestern character, quickly became one of America's most famous paintings and is now firmly entrenched in the nation's popular culture. Yet the artist intended it to be a positive statement about rural American values, an image of reassurance at a time of great dislocation and disillusionment. The man and woman, in their solid and well-crafted world, with all their strengths and weaknesses, represent survivors.

Room in Brooklyn Artist: Hopper Date: 1932 Period: American Realism

The period between the wars, from 1918 to 1943, was a period of unprecedented social change. This was particularly true in America, where the iconic, traditional agrarian lifestyle was replaced by urban scenes of industrial prosperity. The roles of women changed dramatically, starting with the passage of women's suffrage. The changes continued through the socially liberal 1920's and the desperate years of the Depression of the 1930's. Finally seeing the end of the Depression, women were to be seen in situations previously relegated to men alone. Women were seen as capable additions to traditional male workplaces. They no longer need male escorts and long skirts to proclaim their helplessness

Bocca Bociata Artist: Dante Date: 1859 Period: Pre-Raphael

The sensual sitter represents an idealized beauty, while the artist's use of luxurious decorative elements invites sheer visual enjoyment.

Grainstack (Snow Effect) Artist: Monet Date: 1891 Period: Impressionism

Traditionally, the motifs in the artist's series paintings have been seen merely as vehicles through which he could explore the interaction of light, color, and form over the course of the day and in different weather conditions. Grainstacks, for example, are traditional symbols of the land's fertility, the local farmers' material wealth, and the region's prosperity.

The Bay Artist: Frankenthaler Date: 1963 Period: Abstract Expressionism

We see an imposing fluid blue promontory suspended in front of us. Its colors ranging from violet to indigo run into one another with a clear zone of navy near the top of the canvas that draw our eyes up to it. The blurring of the colors gives an immediate sense of the artist's process: paint poured onto the canvas when it was wet. We can almost watch as the blues meld into one another during this early stage giving the image its blurred and smooth finish.

Soft Toilet Artist: Oldenburg Date: 1966 Period: !

Working in large scale is one way of drawing attention to a commonplace item that might otherwise go unnoticed. It is the same strategy that Georgia O'Keeffe used to draw attention to the tiny, everyday flowers that many people take for granted.