Terms- Exam #3- AHIS 6

Happenings

Hurling colors, Meat Joy

Woolworth Building

(1911-1913) The Woolworth building designed by the Minnesota-based firm of Case Gilbert, was the worlds tallest building at 792 feet and 55 floors when first completed. In Gothic-Style external details, inspired by the soaring towers of late Medieval churches, gave the building a strong visual personality.

Jackson Pollock and action painting

(1912-1956) Is the most famous abstract Expressionist painter. By all accounts, he was self-destructive from an early age, developing a drinking problem by age 16, reading Jung by 22, institutionalized for psychiatric problems and alcohol abuse at 26. Pollock pushed beyond the surrealist strategy of automatic painting known as action painting. He drew his inspiration from Jung's theory of the collective unconsciousness.

Villa Sovoye

(1929-1930) a private home outside Paris, became an icon of the international style. Designed by the most important French modern architect. It reflects his purist ideals in its geometric design and avoidance of ornamentation. It is also one of the best expressions of Le Corbusier's domino construction system; System of building construction introduced by the architect Le Corbusier in which reinforced concrete floor slabs are floated on six freestanding posts placed as if at the positions of the six dots on a domino playing piece

Fallingwater

(1937) Frank Lloyd Wright Routinely used new building materials such as ferroconcrete, plate glass, and steel, he sought to maintain a natural sensibility, connecting his building to their sites by using brick and local wood or stone. This Pennsylvanian home is a prime example of this practice. The most famous expression of Wright's conviction that buildings should not simply sit on the landscape but coordinate with them.

Ruins of Guernica

-very influential in America -The painting, which uses a palette of gray, black, and white, is regarded by many art critics as one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history. -displayed to millions of visitors at the Paris World's Fair. It has since become the twentieth century's most powerful indictment against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today. -Much of the painting's emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide -And although the size and multiple figures reference the long tradition of European history paintings, this painting is different because it challenges rather than accepts the notion of war as heroic. So why did Picasso paint it? -Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust to the frenetic action, figures begin to emerge. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in pain and grief, holding the lifeless body of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and unforgettable images in the painting. To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the only unharmed and calm figure amidst the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest of his body is obscured by the overlapping and scattered parts of other figures. In the center stands a terrified horse, mouth open screaming in pain, its side pierced by a spear. On the right are three more women. One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the scene. Another leans out of the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp, while the third woman appears trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their faces are distorted in agony. Eyes are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers. -Picasso chose to paint Guernica in a stark monochromatic palette of gray, black and white. This may reflect his initial encounter with the original newspaper reports and photographs in black and white; or perhaps it suggested to Picasso the objective factuality of an eye witness report. Picasso, Guernica

Bauhaus Building

1925 The Structure openly acknowledges its reinforced concrete, steel, and glass materials, there is also a balanced asymmetry to its three large cubic areas that was intended to convey the dynamism of modern life. A glass panel wall wraps around two sides of the workshop wing of the building to provide natural light for the workshops inside, while a parapet below demonstrates how modern engineering methods could create light, airy spaces.

"Great German Art" exhibition 1937

1937 in Munich; followed the opening of the Museum of German Art (House of German Art); long process of selecting work that was displayed and for sale; also had a degenerate art exhibit.

World war II

1939-1945

Soviet Union

A Communist nation, consisting of Russia and 14 other states, that existed from 1922 to 1991.

Bauhaus

A German interdisciplinary school of fine and applied arts that brought together many leading modern architects, designers, and theatrical innovators.

Cantilever

A cantilever is a beam supported on only one end. The beam carries the load to the support where it is resisted by moment and shear stress. Cantilever construction allows for overhanging structures without external bracing. Cantilevers can also be constructed with trusses or slabs.

Combines

A combine painting is an artwork that incorporates various objects into a painted canvas surface, creating a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture

Color field painting

Color Field Painting- 1940s-1950s painting style related to modernism and abstract expressionism; Mark Rothko in particular. works of art portray paintings with solid areas of color covering the entire canvas.

Benday Dots

A printing process similar to pointillism or small colored dots used by Roy Lichtenstein

Communism

A theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

Proun Space

An active artist in early soviet Russia was El Lissitzky (1890-1941) After the revolution, he taught architecture and graphic arts at the Vitebsk School of Fin Arts. By 1919 Lissitzky was both teaching and using constructivist vocabulary for propaganda posters and for artworks he called prunes ("pro-oon"), thought to be an acronym for the Russian project for the affirmation of the new. Although most Prouns were paintings or prints, there were a few early examples of Installation art- artworks created for a specific site, arranged to create a total environment. Lissitzky rejected painting as too personal and imprecise, preferring to "construct" Prouns for the collective using the less personal instruments of mechanical drawing.

Curtain wall

An exterior building wall that is supported entirely by the frame of the building, rather than being self-supporting or load bearing.

Marilyn Diptych

Andy Warhol, 1962 Period: Pop Art Artist/Patron: Andy Warhol Form Choices: bright colors, use of ready mades, imperfect black and white copies. Mass production of a public image Function: to show the mass production of an iconic sex symbol Name/Date: Marilyn Diptych Content: colored and black and white prints of Marilyn Monroe Context: a "diptych" usually related to a religious subject, as the idolization of celebrities in modern culture can be seen as a type of worship

Wall Hanging

Anni Albers made pictorial weavings and wall hangings that were so innovative that they actually replaced paintings on the walls of several modern. buildings. Her decentralized, rectilinear designs make reference to the aesthetics of De Stijl, but differ in their open acknowledgment of the natural process of weaving. Albers' goal was "to let threads be articulate... and find a form for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration.

International Style

Archetypal, post-World War II modernist architectural style, best known for its "curtain-wall" designs of steel-and-glass corporate high-rises. Inerlocking gray and white planes of varying sizes, combined with horizontal and vertical accents in primary colors and black, create the radically asymmetrical exterior of the Schroder house.

American Regionalism

Art style from 1910 to 1950s that was based on typical American rural and urban scenes. It was a reaction against modernism. art movement characterized by the idea that artists in the US could find their identity by focusing on subject matter that was uniquely American

Socialist Realism

Artistic doctrine imposed by Joseph Stalin in 1934 in the Soviet Union: Traditional and academic; non-experimental. "The truthful depiction of reality in its revolutionary development". All creative artists had to put their work at the service of Stalin's regime.

canyon

Between 1950-1960, Rauschenberg made a series of paintings and sculptures called combines-combinations of paintings and sculptures using nontraditional art materials. Canyon incorporates an assortment of old family photographs, public imagery, fragments of political posters, and various objects salvaged from the trash, or purchased , and projecting three dimensional forms such as stuffed eagle perched on a box and a dirty pillow tied with cord and suspended from a piece of wood. The rich disorder, enhanced by the seemingly sloppy application of paint, challenges the viewers to make sense of what they see. Since he meant his work to be open to various readings, Rauschenberg assembled material that each viewer might interpret differently. Cheerfully accepting the chaos and unpredictability of modern urban experience, he sought its metaphorical representation in art.

Atom bomb

Dada and Surrealism The Great Depression Disillusionment after WW1 WWII US dropped atomic bombs on Japan

The great city of Tenochtitlan

Diego Rivera 1945 This piece was painted as part of a mural cycle that used stylized forms and brilliant local colors to portray the history of Mexico in the National Palace in Mexico City.

De Stijl

Dutch post-WWI movement that believed that their style revealed the underlying structure of existence; art was simplistic and used primary colors and horizontal and vertical lines (invented by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg)

Aspects of Negro Life

For the Harlem branch of the New York public library under the sponsorship of the depression-era Public Works of Art Project.To the right, slaves are celebrating the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, from which radiate concentric circles of light At the center, an orator gestures dramatically, pointing to the United States Capitol in the background, as if to urge all African Americans, some of whom are still picking cotton in the foreground, to exercise their right to vote. To the left, Union Soldiers leave the South after Reconstruction, while the KKK members, hooded and on horseback, charge in, reminding viewers that the fight for civil rights has just begun. Aaron Douglas 1934

Woman I

Form; -Slashing paint onto canvas (Picasso inspired) -Aggressive movement of paint (action painting) -Abstract style -Many layers of paint Content: -Smile is from a magazine ad -Great fierce teeth and huge eyes (not attractive) -Large breasts Function: -Breasts were a satire on women who were in magazines -Critical look at the post world war pinup and the disapproval of the pornographic culture Context: -Series of 60 "Woman" paintings -artist: William de Kooning: Dutch-American abstract expressionist painter

Avant-Garde v. kitsch (Greenberg)

Highlights the dangers of work that is 'kitsch', as it has the potential to operate as propaganda for the governmental use, it can be understood easily and absorbed passively by any one person- it is entertainment, everything is obvious to the eye. The 'avant-garde' belongs to the elite, higher class, and it is 'good' art as it difficult to understand.

Hurling Colors

In Gutai group performances, the act of creating itself was the artwork. Gutai organized outdoor installations theatrical events, and dramatic performances . At the second Gutai Exhibition in 1956, Shozo Shimamoto performed hurling colors by smashing bottles of paint against a canvas on the floor. He pushed Pollock's gestural painting technique to the point where the work of art is resided in the performance of painting, not in the object produced. In fact artists regularly destroyed the physical products they created at the end of each performance.

Russian Revolution: February 1917- overthrow of imperial government; October 1917- Bolsheviks seize power.

In the 1917 Russian Revolution, the radical socialist Bolsheviks overthrew the tsar, withdrew Russia from the world war, and turned inward to fight a civil war that lasted until 1920 and led to the establishment of the U.S.S.R. Most Russian avant-garde artists enthusiastically supported the. bolsheviks, who initially supported them.

Autumn Rhythm

Jackson Pollock 1950 In 1950, while Polluck painted Hans Hamuth filmed him. Pollock worked in a renovated barn, where he could reach into the laid canvas from all four sides. The German expatriate artist Hans Hofmann had poured and dripped paint before Pollock, but pollock's unrestrained gestures transformed the idea of painting itself by moving around and within the canvas, dripping and scoring commercial-grade enamel paint (rather than specialist artist's paint) onto it using sticks and trowels. Some have described Pollock's urgent arcs and whorls of paint as chaotic , but he saw them as labyrinths that led viewers along complex paths and into an organic calligraphic web of natural and biomorphic forms. Pollock's compositions lack hierarchical arrangement, contain multiple moving focal points, and deny perspective space. Yet as paint travels around the canvas, it never escapes the edges. There is a top and bottom. Like a coiled spring, the self-contained painting bursts with anxious energy, ready to explode at any moment.

The Migration Series

Jacob Lawrence 1940-41 Lawrence created his most expansive series in 1940-1941. 60 panels chronicle the great migration, a journey that had brought Lawrence's own parents from South Carolina to Atlantic City, New Jersey. In the first panel, African American migrants stream through the doors of a southern train station on their way to Chicago, New York, or St. Louis. Lawrence's boldly abstracted silhouette style, with its flat bright shapes and colors, draws consciously and directly- like that of Douglas- on African Visual sources. Lawrence later illustrated books by Harlem Renaissance authors.

Gutai group

Japanese group who performed hurling colors.

Target with Plaster Casts

Jasper Johns 1955 Abstract Expressionism In this work Jasper johns not only stretches formalism to its limits; he actually mocks it. This work is neither a painting nor a sculpture but both. The arrangement of casts of body parts in recessed spaces across the top parodies the nonhierarchical manner Abstract Expressionism, while the target pictured below is the very embodiment of hierarchy. The Target's flatness of suggests an all-over composition, but targets always have a central focus. And neither the target nor the casts are abstractions; both actually refer to popular culture and the world around Johns. The Target also raises thorny questions about the nature of representation: Is this painting of a target or is it an actual target? The meaning of this work is fluid and unfixed-- it contains recognizable body parts and a recognizable object (a target) but the purpose of their inclusion is unclear . Unlike abstract Expressionist paintings, Johns' art is emotionally cool and highly cerebral. Like many artists of his generation , John reintroduces readily recognizable, real world images and objects that he strategically decontextualized in order to question the form appearance, content, and meaning of art.

Environments`

Kaprow Yard

Yard

Kaprow in 1958, Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), another student of John Cage, began to create environments and, in 1959, Happenings. Yard was staged in 1961 within the walled garden space behind the Martha Jackson Gallery in Manhattan. Kaprow filled the space with used tires, tar paper, and barrels, and asked viewers to walk through it, to experience the smell and physicality of the rubber and tar firsthand , recontextualized in the art gallery space. Kaprow later described how gallery audiences- more formally dressed then than they would be today, especially the women, who wore dresses and heels-experienced aspects of the urban environment in unfamiliar and unanticipated ways as they tumbled in and over the tires.

Tsar Nicholas II

Last Tsar of Russia and then end of the Romanov line. Was executed along with the rest of his family under the order of Lenin.

Vladimir Lenin

Leader of the Bolshevik (later Communist) Party. He lived in exile in Switzerland until 1917, then returned to Russia to lead the Bolsheviks to victory during the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed. Happens in the middle of WWI A lot of chaos and destruction Country turns to Marxist Socialism Vladimir Lenin was in Zurich in 1916, did not care about the Dadaists Lenin becomes first leader of communist Russia, and leaves artists alone For a few years, there are a lot of experimentation going on (expressionist, futurists) modern abstract

Joseph Stalin

Lenin dies and Joseph Stalin comes to power With the arrival of Stalin and his ruling, the Russian Utopia becomes something else Millions of people either sent to forced labor camps, executed, emigrate to US Communist Russia becomes a policed state everyone is watched and controlled In 1932, decided that people can't group together to form art groups no more sharing ideas Stalin made it so that people could not be in a group 1934- Stalin says that if you are an artist in creative sense, have to do it in a way that is called "Socialist Realism" there will be no more modern experimentation

Coffee and Tea Service

Marianne Brandt 1924 Germany Bauhaus-Modernism a prototype handcrafted in silver for mass production in cheaper metals, is an example of the collaboration between design and industry at the bauhaus. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Brandt also designed lighting fixtures and table lamps for mass production, earning much needed revenue for the school.

The big three Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco

Mexican Muralism headed by "the big three" painters, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1920s to 1970s a large number of murals with nationalistic, social and political messages were created on public buildings

The worker

Proletariat= alienated from means of production

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Richard Hamilton argued that modern mass visual culture was fast replacing traditional art for the general public, that movies, television, and advertising, not high art, defined standards of beauty. To create a visual expression of this disharmonious world of excessive consumption, Hamilton created collages composed of images drawn from advertising. In this 1956 piece Hamilton critiques marketing strategies by imitating them. The title parodies an advertising slogan while the collage itself shows two figures named Adam and Eve in a domestic setting. Like the biblical forebears, these figures are almost naked, but the temptations to which they have succumbed are those of consumer culture, He called this work pop art creating a broader movement in the process. Hamilton's collage comment on the visual overload of the 1950's and on the culture's inability to differentiate between important and trivial images or between advertising world and the real one.

Workers Club

Rodchenko, 1925 Designed for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial arts. Rodenchenko emphasized ease of use and simplicity of construction; he made the furniture of wood because Soviet industry was best equipped for mass production in wood. The high straight backs

Oh, Jeff... I Love You, Too... But...

Roy Lichtenstein, 1964 Period: Pop Art Artist/Patron: Roy Lichtenstein Form Choices: Bright colors, bold dark lines, tenebrism, dotted shading to simulate digitized prints, text bubble depicts a shallow yet dramatic moment Function: appeal to the public with pop culture Name/Date: Oh Jeff Content: character from a comic Context: taken from parts of a popular comic Compresses a popular romance storyline involving a crisis that temporarily threatens a love relationship into a single frame. But Lichtenstein plays ironic games by pitting illusions against reality; we know that comic books are unrealistically melodramatic, yet he presents this overblown episode vividly, almost reverently, enshrined in a work of high art. Benday dots

Leon Trotsky

Russian revolutionary intellectual and close adviser to Lenin. A leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), he was later expelled from the Communist Party (1927) and banished (1929) for his opposition to the authoritarianism of Stalin

Meat Joy

Schneemann Many early Performance artists were women, who's bodies had been the object of the male gaze in art for centuries. Performance art enabled women to control how their bodies were viewed and to look back and even challenge their audience. One of the most important early examples is Meat Joy by Carolee Schneemann, a radial feminist performance, first enacted by Jean-Jacques Lebel and the Kinetic Group Theater at the festival de la libra Expression in Paris, and a second time in New York, where it was filmed and photographed. Eight men and Women first undressed one another, then danced, rolled on the floor ecstatically, and played with a mixture of raw fish, raw sausages, partially plucked raw and bloody chickens, wet paint, and scraps of paper. Scheemann wanted both performers and audiences to smell, taste, and feel the body and its fluids. Critics described the piece variously as an erotic rite and a visceral celebration of flesh and blood. It countered the expectation that work of art was something to be examined in cool unemotional space of an art gallery with the viewer in control.

Russian Constructivism

Sparked by the Russian Revolution, this movement sought to combine the new technologies of photography and film to create dynamic compositions for posters, books, magazines, buildings, and interior designs. "Production Art" Merged art with tech in products from household objects to textiles, propaganda, stage sets, political rallies "Art Into Life" An outgrowth of the Russian Revolution, constructivism comprised a group of artists dedicated to working collectively for the state.

Mexican Mural Movement

Starts in Mexico during the 1920's. Accessible to pubic, usually on buildings. Denounced European influence and celebrated Mexican heritage. Reinforced national pride. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were a couple who were artists.

Independent group

The Independent Group (IG) were a radical group of young artists, writers and critics who met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in the 1950s, and challenged the dominant modernist (and as they saw it elitist) culture dominant at that time, in order to make it more inclusive of popular culture-Eduardo Paolozzi was a member

Schroder House

The architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) applied Mondrian's principles of dynamic equilibrium and De Stijl's aesthetic theories to architecture (composition with yellow , Red, and Blue) and created one of the most important examples of the international Style. Interlocking gray and white planes of varying sizes, combined with horizontal and vertical accents in primary colors and black, create the radically asymmetrical exterior of the Schoder House in Utrecht.

Organic Architecture

Use of natural colours Natural resources/materials from surrounding environment - wood, stone, glass Form and function is unified Harmonious relationship between inhabitants and nature Rural location Frank Lloyd Wright's design process

Socialism

a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

Arts and Crafts Movement

a social and artistic movement of the second half of the 19th cent. Emphasizing a return to handwork, skilled craftsmanship, and attention to design in the decorative arts, from the mechanization and mass production of the Industrial Revolution

Art Nouveau

a style of decorative art, architecture, and design prominent in western Europe and the US from about 1890 until World War I and characterized by intricate linear designs and flowing curves based on natural forms.

Action Painting

an abstract painting in which the artist drips or splatters paint onto a surface like a canvas in order to create his or her work Rosenberg

Degenerate Art Exhibition 1937

an art exhibition organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich. Hitler declared degenerate art as art that destroyed or confused natural form, insult german feeling, or reveal an absence of artistic skill

Neo-dada

expanded subject matter mid-late 50s Jasper Johns & Rauschenberg emphasis on work of art produced rather than the concept uses modern materials and absurdist tendancies

Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, New York, 1936

introduction to liquid paint

encaustic

one of the earliest methods of applying color to a surface, uses pigment in a wax vehicle that has een heated to liquid, durable, colors remain vibrant, used by eqyptions and romans, surface will retain hard luster

Performance art

owes a debt to pollock whose physical enactment of the act of painting resulted in a work of art in its own right

The bourgeoisie

owners of means of production=primary interests are capitalist

Silk screen printing

printing process used often for textiles where ink is transferred through a fine stretched mesh screen Warhol

WPA (Works Progress Administration)

ran from 1935-1943, most important work relief agency of the depression era.

Prouns

term coined by lissitzky; an acronym for the russian phrase meaning "project for the affirmation of the new" -"for the new art" / "new art objects" Although most Prouns were paintings or prints, there were a few early examples of installation art- artworks created for a specific site, arranged to create a total environment. Lissitzky rejected paintings as too personal and imprecise, preferring to "construct" Prouns for the collective using the less personal instruments of mechanical drawing.

Karl Marx/Marxism

the political, economic, and social theories of Karl Marx during the second industrial revolution which included the idea that history is the story of class struggle and that ultimately the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeosie and establish a dictatorship en route to a classless society - Equalization of the classes... taken to extremes - Communism

skyscraper

use of metal beams and girders for the structural support skeleton; the separation of the building-support structure from the enclosing wall layer; the use of fireproof materials and measures; the use of elevators; and the overall integration of plumbing, central heating, artificial lighting and ventilation systems.