Modern Art History Final

"The crux of Minimalism" (Hal Foster)

"We arrive, then, at this equation: minimalism breaks with late modernism through a partial reprise of the historical avant-garde, specifically its disruption of the formal categories of institutional art. To understand minimalism - that is, to understand its significance for advanced art since its time - both parts of this equation must be grasped at once.

Greenbergian Modernism

"the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence."

The Armory Show

1913; first large-scale modernist exhibition in U.S.; New; extremely influential; highly controversial

291 (The Stieglitz Circle)

291: Steiglitz's Gallery 291 Dove, Hartley, Marin, Okeefe etc

Jean Paul Sartre

A French existentialist who said that people just "turned up" and that there was no God to help honest people. Also said "man is condemned to be free" and people had to choose their actions.

Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity)

A German art movement that grew directly from the war time experiences of artist who sought to show the horrors of war and its effects. Rejected Abstract Expressionism.

Orphism

A form of Cubism developed by the French painter Robert Delaunay in which color plays an important role.

Puteaux Group

A group of artists associated with Cubism and Orphism. Became known after their showing at the Salon des Independents. Key artists include Delaunay.

Happenings

A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere, and are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience. Key elements of happenings are planned, but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation. ***KAPROW

Synesthesia

A neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Establishes connections between different senses, i.e. Kandinsky and his use of color to evoke feelings which echo those produced by music.

Neo Plasticism

A style of abstract painting developed by Mondrian that uses only vertical and horizontal lines and rectangular shapes in neutral and primary colors.

Gutai

After World War II, focused on the performative aspect in art. Gutai Art Association in Japan concerned with staging art actions. The physical object left over didn't matter.

Post-Painterly Abstraction

American movement that developed out of Abstract Expressionism; was coolly detached and used tight pictorial control

Conceptual Art

An American avant-garde art movement of the 1960s that asserted that the "artfulness" of art lay in the artist's idea rather than its final expression.

Optical Art

An art style particularly popular in the 1960s in which line and color are manipulated in ways that stimulate the eye into believing it perceives movement

Purism

An early-20th-century art movement that embraced the "machine esthetic" and sought purity of form in the clean functional lines of industrial machinery.

Appropriation

Appropriation in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them.[1] The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts (literary, visual, and musical). Appropriation can be understood as "the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work."

Relational Aesthetics (Nicholas Bourriaud)

Art work which focuses on human relationships and social spaces rather than emphasizing art objects in private galleries, homes, or museums.

Socialist Realism

Attempt within the USSR to relate formal culture to the masses in order to avoid the adoption of Western European cultural forms; begun under Joseph Stalin; fundamental method of Soviet fiction, art, and literary criticism.

Sigmund Freud

Austrian neurologist who originated psychoanalysis (1856-1939); Said that human behavior is irrational; behavior is the outcome of conflict between the id (irrational unconscious driven by sexual, aggressive, and pleasure-seeking desires) and ego (rationalizing conscious, what one can do) and superego (ingrained moral values, what one should do).

Color Field Painting

Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

De Stijl

De Stijl, Dutch for "The Style", also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands

Expressionism

Emphasizes the life of the mind and feelings rather than the realistic external details of everyday life. German Expressionism: De Koonig

"death of the author" (Roland Barthes)

Essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated.

"Return to Order"

Euro art movement after WW1 that rejects extreme avant-garde

John Cage

Experimental music pioneer. Known for percussion music, prepared piano, and chance/aleatory music. "Bacchanal" was his first prepared piano piece, 4'33" was his most famous piece, & wrote "Sonatas & Interludes for Prepared Piano." Influenced by Cowell and Schoenberg.

Frottage/grattage

Frottage: Dry technique/ piece of paper and rub then use as spring board and work into. Grattage: Wet technique/ multiple layer on canvas and run in texture. *Max Ernst used techniques

The "Dematerialization of Art" (Lucy Lippard and John Chandler)

In "Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object" Lucy Lippard characterizes the period of 1966 to 1972 as one in which the art object was dematerialised through the new artistic practices of conceptual art

Environments (Installation)

Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space

Combine Painting

Robert-Raushenberg's name for his works of high-relief collage

Site-specific

Site-specific art is created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork.

Womanhouse

Started by notedly Chicago and Schapiro, Womanhouse was a house scheduled to be demolished on the california highway that was leased for the feminine art movement and was remade in 1972. Woman was a feminist art collective that became a house for women to explore femininity. Rooms in the house included Grey's Lipstick Bathroom and Frazier's Nurturant Kitchen. SIngerman also mentioned in class that in Womanhouse the models of women displayed they never have genitals, in this sense woman house, and feminist art in general, almost rejects the history of art.

C.J. Jung

Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.

British Independents

The IG consisted of painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who wanted to challenge prevailing modernist approaches to culture. They introduced mass culture into debates about high culture, re-evaluated modernism and created the "as found" or "found object" aesthetic.

The Pictures Generation

The first formal labeling of a group of artists exhibited around their appropriation of images from the consumer and media saturated age in which they grew to maturity both artistically and in years

Existentialism

The idea that human beings simply exist, have no higher purpose, and must exist and choose their actions for themselves.

Degenerate Art

The label Nazis placed on the avant- garde art. Hitler persecuted many artist confiscated and placed them in a Degenerate Art Show and subjected them to ridicule

Phenomenology

The study of individuals' own unique, first-person, conscious experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A phenomenological philosopher, thought there was a prevalent distinction between primary and secondary modes of expression. Understands "style" as a projection of a painter's originality.

Eccentric Abstraction (Lucy Lippard)

The use of organic abstract form in sculpture evoking the gendered body through an emphasis on process and materials. Lucy Lippard coined the term for an article in Art International

School of Paris

Xenophobic French critics to distinguish between native and foreign artists. Balance, order, and rationality. Emphasis on creativity and individuality. Later the definition morphs to include art in Paris between WW1 and WW2.

André Breton

[1896-1966] French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism.

Surrealism

a 20th century movement of artists and writers (developing out of Dadaism) who used fantastic images and incongruous juxtapositions in order to represent unconscious thoughts and dreams

Automatism

a form of Surrealism based on a dictation of thought without control of the mind

Suprematism

a geometric abstractionis movement that originated in Russia and influenced constructivism. Emphasized the nonobjective form (circles/squares). ***Key artist: Malaevich

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)

a group of German expressionist painters formed in Munich in 1911, including Kandinsky and Klee, who sought to express the spiritual side of man and nature, which they felt had been neglected by impressionism. Can be characterized by their effusive and expressive use of color.

Mexican Muralists

a group of Mexican Artists determined to base their art on their indigenous history and culture existing before the European arrived (Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera)

Biomorphism

a movement stressing organic shapes that hint at natural forms. "Amoeba like forms" as shown through Miro's work.

Fluxus

a name taken from a Latin word meaning "flow, flux" is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is sometimes described as intermedia. Originated as Anti-Art.

"What you see is what you see" (Frank Stella)

a phrase that exemplified the minimalist movement

Photo-Secessionists

a. An early 20th century movement that promoted photography as fine art form b. Alfred Stieglitz was a founding member

Pop Art

an American school of the 1950s that imitated the techniques of commercial art (as the soup cans of Andy Warhol) and the styles of popular culture and the mass media

Futurism

an Italian movement begun shortly before and during WWI. It depicted dynamic movement and stressed the violence and speed of the Machine Age. They advocated revolution and glorified war.(Balla, Severini, Boccioni)

Minimalism

an art movement in sculpture and painting that began in the 1950s and emphasized extreme simplification of form and color

Readymade

an object made for another purpose, but displayed by an artist as art (bicycle wheel, urinal, hat rack)

Post-Minimalism

contemporary style combining lush harmonies of New Romanticism with high-energy rhythms of minimalism; John Adams is a major exponent

Paranoiac-critical method

created by Dali 1933 Rather than reach subconscious through automatism, Dali made conscious effort to distort his vision and achieve delusional thoughts; "[A] spontaneous assimilation of irrational knowledge based upon the critical and systematic objectification of delirious phenomena."

Land Art/Earth Art

created using natural landscape. incorporated into and is meant to change according to environment goldsworthy, reconstructd icicles

Essentialism v. Constructivist ideas of feminism

differences in male and female behavior were due to cultural training and nothing more. Such differences, you would say, were merely constructed. Therefore, this school of feminist thinking is known as "constructivism" In opposition was the theory called essentialism, which said that men and women were different in their essence. That is, that they were spiritually or psychologically different for reasons that cultural training could not fully explain.

Postmodernism

genre of art and literature and especially architecture in reaction against principles and practices of established modernism

Die Brücke (The Bridge)

group of artist who paved the way to society by bridging the old with the new; modeled after a medieval guild; spoke out against hypocrisy; explore haunting human form; study ethnographic collections for inspiration. Kirchner, Nolde.

Nouveau Réalistes

had the same gallerist, inspired by dada, new perceptions of the real, ie. Yves Klein

Regionalism

in art or literature, the practice of focusing on a particular region of the country

Neo-Expressionism

is an art movement which emerged in the 1970's and reflects the artist's interest in expressing feeling in a new way. Many drawings are garish and crudely drawn.

Assemblage

making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects

Fauvism

means wild beast. Because of the wild color, powerful, brutal brushwork, the term was derogatory(Henri Matisse, Andre Derain). Utilizes unnatural colors and simplified forms.

Action Painting

principle method in American Abstract Expressionism where painting is revealed through the brush gesture and the signature left by the fall and touch of the paint

"straight" photography

refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing the use of manipulation.

Sublime

s the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. Connects to the philosophies of Kant and Hegel.

Color Field

term for painting that consists of large areas of color with no obvious structure, central focus, or dynamic balance. Also key is their use of simple shapes, as seen in the cases of Frankenthaler and Rothko.

The Eight (The Ashcan School)

the group to which all the frustrated artists enrolled in the Philadelphia school of art moved to, pre-WWI realism. Key artists: Bellows, Hopper

Photomontage

the technique of creating a composition by pasting together images to create one image

Constructivism

theoretical perspective proposing that learners construct, rather than absorb, knowledge from their experiences. Abstract movement originating in Russia after WW1

Proto-Pop/Neo-Dada

use of mass-produced images and objects anticipates pop art combine painting (collage, 2D & assemblage, 3D) (Johns and Rauschenberg).

Abstract Expressionism

was the first American avant-garde movement. Called the New York School because the art scene shifted from Europe to New York. Expresses passion and visceral intensity.

Body and Performance Art

• differ the most from minimalism. • Focus on their body. • completely non tradition with medium. • Do performances. • use of video, incorporation of the viewer.