Art History Final

Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912

Synthetic cubism - vibrant color comes back 1912-1914 Collage & charcoal one of picassos first collage influenced by his childhood from spain to france The collage contains both visual and verbal puns. Visually: the wine glass with a stem that looks like a cartoon face; the paper painted to look like wood. Verbally: JOU, a word fragment that, in French, conjures up the root of the verb JOUER, to play; and the headline with its possible reference to the battle in art in France at this time His emotional involvement with the Spanish civil war led him to create works depicting the brutality of war, as well as other images of political protest.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) Marcel Duchamp, 1915-1923

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is often called the Large Glass because that is precisely what it is: two pieces of glass, which are stacked vertically and framed like a double-hung window to reach over nine feet tall. Though the Large Glass is essentially a flat, two-dimensional object, it is emphatically not a painting, as it is mostly transparent—you can walk around it and view it from both sides—and Duchamp avoided using traditional materials like canvas and oil paint. Instead, he concocted the imagery on the glass surface out of wire, foil, glue, and varnish. He also allowed dust to collect on the glass as it laid flat in his studio, which he affixed with adhesive. Duchamp stopped working on the Large Glass in 1923, after eight years, not because it was complete, but because he decided it should remain "definitively unfinished." Later, in 1927, when the glass was en route to collector Katherine Dreier's house from an exhibition in Brooklyn, he was thrilled to discover it had been damaged, saying the accidental cracking finished the work in a way that he never could have. the action begins in the upper left corner with the "Bride," the element that resembles a bug or a tree. She flirts by stripping for the "Bachelors" in the lower register. The Bachelors are the nine vaguely anthropomorphic cylinders in the lower left section of the glass, and they think the Bride is very attractive. Each Bachelor is trying to win her affection, but they exist in a completely different zone, and are having a hard time communicating with her. The goal for each Bachelor is to land his shot within one of the three square windows inside of the cloud that hovers at the top of the glass (Draft Piston or Nets). If he can do that, he will win the Bride and they will be able to consummate their love physically. even those duchamp made it not possible Duchamp's writings reveal that he imagined the Bride's realm as the mysterious fourth dimension of space, a higher plane from the Bachelors who live in our common three-dimensional world. This accounts for their miscommunications and failed attempts at finding love. In the Large Glass, Duchamp brought art, science, sex, and love together in an absurdly humorous way.

Georges Braque, House at L'Esaque. 1908 Oil on Canvas

The cubist revolution 1905-1908 free color expression towards firm pictorial structure "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone" youngest of cubist painters joined fauve circle & discovered cezanne cezannism is dominant in this painting boldly abstracted pictures—color reduced to ochres & dark, hatched greens, the planes of their angular imagery and gridlocked masses fused to make space and mass barely distinguishable picasso was main guy of cubism then braque joined in cubism went deeper than fauvism unitary, fixed, egocentric focus of multiple and mixed perspectives thus presenting the subject in its many aspects all at once did not reach total abstraction

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

The impetus for the painting came while Wood was visiting the small town of Eldon in his native Iowa. There he spotted a little wood farmhouse, with a single oversized window, made in a style called Carpenter Gothic. "I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house," he said. He used his sister and his dentist as models for a farmer and his daughter, dressing them as if they were "tintypes from my old family album." The highly detailed, polished style and the rigid frontality of the two figures were inspired by Flemish Renaissance art, which Wood studied during his travels to Europe between 1920 and 1928. 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 Wood 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

Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, Film still Un Chien Andalou, 1929

1929 Franco-Spanish silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. It was Buñuel's first film and was initially released in 1929 with a limited showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes. Buñuel told Dalí at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dalí responded that he had dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. Excitedly, Buñuel declared: "There's the film, let's go and make it." They were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions In his 1939 autobiography Buñuel said: "In the film the aesthetics of Surrealism are combined to some of Freud's discoveries. The film was totally in keeping with the basic principle of the school, which defined Surrealism as 'Psychic Automatism', unconscious, capable of returning to the mind its true functions, beyond any form of control by reason, morality or aesthetics

Jean Hans Arp. Arrangement According to the Laws of Chance (Collage with Squares). 1916-17 Torn and pasted papers on paper

Arp created this collage in Zurich in 1916-17, at the geographic and temporal heart of the Dada movement. reminded world that there are independent men, beyond war and nationalism, who live for other ideals Profoundly affected by the trauma of modern warfare and the expansion of print media, Arp and his fellow Dadaists sought to radically rethink the very nature of art. They held reason and rationality responsible for World War I and, in response, employed new, antirational aesthetic strategies, including abstraction, collage, and the use of chance procedures. This collage fully embodies Dada's demands of the new art. According to his contemporaries, Arp made this work and others like it by tearing paper into pieces, letting them fall to the floor, and pasting each scrap where it happened to land. Rather than ordering the page according to his own design, he ceded control to the random hand of gravity. The work is resolutely nonreferential: no story, no picture, only torn blue and white paper However, the grid-like composition of this collage may be evidence that Arp did not fully relinquish control. Careful examination also reveals that he used heavyweight, possibly fine-art, paper, and that the edges were torn on a slant to reveal their inner fibers. It suggests a counterintuitive interpretation: that the work may be as much a visual representation of chance as a product of it

Kasimir Malevich. Suprematist Painting (eight red rectangles) 1915. oil on canvas

Cubo-futurist art The three levels of Suprematism were described by Malevich as black, colored and white. Eight Red Rectangles is an example of the second, more dynamic phase, in which primary colors began to be used. Its name derived from Malevich's belief that Suprematist art would be superior to all the art of the past, and that it would lead to the "supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." The composition is somewhat ambiguous, since while on the one hand the rectangles can be read as floating in space, as if they were suspended on the wall, they can also be read as objects seen from above Indeed he later criticized this more dynamic phase of his Suprematist movement as 'aerial Suprematism,' since its compositions tended to echo pictures of the earth taken from the skies, and in this sense departed from his ambitions for a totally abstract, non-objective art. The uneven spacing and slight tilt of the juxtaposed shapes in Eight Red Rectangles, as well as the subtly different tones of red, infuse the composition with energy, allowing Malevich to experiment with his concept of "infinite" space.

Marcel Duchamp. Bottle Rack (Bottle Dryer), 1914

Dada Artist a proto-Dada artwork created in 1914 by Marcel Duchamp. His answer was the "readymade," an ordinary object transformed into a work of art by virtue of the artist selecting it. The readymades did not have the serious tone of European Dada works, which criticized the violence of World War I, and instead focused on a more nonsensical nature, chosen purely on the basis of a "visual indifference" Taken out of context, repositioned, and signed by the artist, the readymade upended tradition and artistic convention by revolutionizing the way we think about what an artwork is, how it is produced, and the ways in which it is exhibited. hierarchy of artistic values being challenged The original piece was destroyed, mistaken as garbage due to its appearance and thrown out by Duchamp's sister and stepsister after the artist left France in 1914 for the United States.[2] While the original no longer survives, the legacy of the work lives on, with at least seven replicas While Duchamp asserted that his readymades were done without any specific reason, art critics contend that the piece has sexual undertones of a Freudian nature. Critics suggest that the metal spikes represent the male genitalia, and that the absence of bottles is a reference to Duchamp being a bachelor at the time, a theme they claim is repeatedly conveyed throughout his works.

Hannah Hoch Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919 Collage

Dada Artist from Germany 1918-1920 dada spread from Zurich to Germany Here she uses cuttings from newspapers and magazines to create one cohesive image out of a myriad of disparate parts. This technique of taking words and images from the established press to make new and subversive statements was highly innovative. The piece was exhibited in the First International Dada Fair, which took place in Berlin in 1920, and it was reportedly one of the most popular pieces in the show. In the top right corner Höch has pasted together images of "anti-Dada:" figures of the Weimar government and representatives of the old empire. The effect is initially one of visual confusion, and yet a kind of nonsense-narrative begins to develop with sustained attention. One figure is transformed into something else by the addition of a de-contextualised newspaper clipping, such as the Kaiser's iconic moustache replaced by a pair of upside-down wrestlers. The work encapsulates the eclecticism and eccentricities of Dadaism, but also makes a pointed political statement against the staid establishment; it is a carefully-crafted homage to anarchistic opposition.

The Elephant Celebes, 1921 - by Max Ernst

Dada arist to provides the basis for a pictorial exploration of the irrational subconscious. This painting grew directly out of Ernst's use of collage from 1919 onwards to produce bizarre combinations of images, though no preliminary collages or sketches were made for it. The idea of the painting appeared spontaneously on the canvas with few alterations as it progressed At center, a large round shape dominates the composition that Ernst based upon a photograph of a Sudanese bin for storing corn which the artist has refigured as an elephant-like mechanical being from the subconscious. The painting's title (sometimes known as The Elephant Celebes) comes from a childish and naughty German rhyme Ernst's painting demonstrates his indebtedness to Freudian dream theory with its odd juxtapositions of disparate objects. Despite this disparity - a headless/nude woman, the bits of machinery - the painting holds together as a finished composition. Through this work, Ernst questions which is the "real" world - that of night-time and dreams - or that of the waking state.

Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player. 1913. Oil on Canvas

FUTURISM italian artist umberto boccioni Fascinated with the speed and noise of machinery and cities, the Futurists were intentionally rejecting traditional imagery and creating works that were utterly modern and radical. It was all about speed and the perception of movement. inspired by F. T . Marinetti's futurists manifesto in 1909 Boccioni's Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting: "To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere . . . movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies." In this work a soccer player dematerializes into a luminous and flickering atmosphere, save for his firmly sculpted calf, at center. With stippled brushwork and kaleidoscopic color, the painting communicates the spirited energy of a youthful athlete. exhibits cubist inspiration inventing a new way of painting and depicting aspects of familiar objects not presented before

Edward Steichen, Flatiron, blue pigment gum bichromate-platinum, 1907

Pictorialists Steichen added color to the platinum print that forms the foundation of this photograph by using layers of pigment suspended in a light-sensitive solution of gum arabic and potassium bichromate. Together with two variant prints in other colors, also in the Museum's collection, "The Flatiron" is the quintessential chromatic study of twilight. Clearly indebted in its composition to the Japanese woodcuts that were in vogue at the turn of the century and in its coloristic effect to the "Nocturnes" of Whistler, this picture is a prime example of the conscious effort of photographers in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz to assert the artistic potential of their medium. Steichen and Stieglitz selected this photograph for inclusion in the "International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography" held at the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) in Buffalo, New York, in 1910. The exhibition of six hundred photographs represented the capstone of Stieglitz's efforts to promote Pictorialist photography as a fine art.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, blue, and Yellow. 1930 Oil on Canvas

Pure abstract art becomes completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances. —Piet Mondrian, 1929 The composition is similarly reduced to the simplest of rectilinear forms, squares and rectangles defined by vertical and horizontal lines. 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. 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. 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 neo-plasticism envisioned as am art directed at an ideal society not yet born ideal order of nonobjective art was linked to a coming utopian social order, and artists have been summoned to help reconstruct humanity life and world

Umberto Boccioni, Development of a bottle in space. 1912. silvered bronze

Rather than delineating the contours of his subject, a bottle, Boccioni integrated the object's internal and external spatial planes, which appear to unfold and spiral into surrounding space Futurist sculpture that was initially a sketch in boccionis technical manifesto of futurist sculpture this work of art highlights the artist's first successful attempt at creating a sculpture that both molds and encloses space within itself The subject matter of Boccioni's work, a deconstructed glass bottle, fits into the framework of futurism, a movement largely obsessed with recent technological innovations. Technology to mass-produce glass bottles was first implemented in the latter portion of the 19th century and began rapidly expanding around the time Boccioni began to formulate his work in 1912 The sculpture was originally cast as a silvery bronze bottle, but was then intentionally stripped open and sculpted, a process that involved breaking the bottle into winding sections and combining absolute and relative motion to give it a rotary appearance.

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936

Surrealism 1924-1930s Unlike the dada objects, the fur lined- cup, saucer, and spoon were not designed to startle the viewer but to release anthropomorphic associations. The artist possessed a wry wit and was keenly aware of how women were regarded by both the Surrealists and society. Suffused with humor, eroticism, and menacing darkness, her work reflected her critical explorations of female sexuality, identity, and exploitation Women were largely regarded as the subjects and muses of the men who dominated Surrealism wrapped them in the speckled tan fur of a Chinese gazelle, and titled this ensemble Object. In doing so, she transformed items traditionally associated with decorum and feminine refinement into a confounding Surrealist sculpture. Object exemplifies the poet and founder of Surrealism André Breton's argument that mundane things presented in unexpected ways had the power to challenge reason, to urge the inhibited and uninitiated (that is, the rest of society) to connect to their subconscious—whether they were ready for it or, more likely, not. "Art [...] has to do with spirit, not with decoration,"4 Oppenheim once wrote

Georgio de Chirico, The soothsayer's recompense. 1913 oil on canvas

The piece was created in France, through a process of "squaring-up" in which De Chirico drew a version of the piece divided into nine squares, and subsequently used this draft to quickly create the fleshed-out painting. This painting is one of a series of melancholic cityscapes that de Chirico painted featuring a lone statue in a deserted Italian piazza. The antique statue represents the sleeping Ariadne, who according to Greek mythology was abandoned by her lover on the desert island of Naxos. The confrontation of the classical world with a modern steam engine in the distance creates an uneasy ambiguity of time and space. Italian surrealist painter came to paris in 1911 and made contact with picasso dream imagery of power and intensity but also captured the spirit of the age, to convey, "irremediable anxiety"

Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers, New York, photogravure, 1900

Through his work and writing, photographer Alfred Stieglitz was instrumental in establishing photography as a recognized fine art form. Some of Steiglitz's best-known photographs are of the painter Georgia O'Keeffe (who would eventually become his wife), and in line with his belief that great photography "becomes more real than reality," these close-up portraits convey as much about form as they do about her personality and their relationship. Stieglitz was feverishly devoted to his work and mission and produced thousands of editions in his lifetime, covering numerous themes that captured a period of rapid transition in American society. In 1905, he opened 291 Gallery in New York City to promote pioneering photographers and avant-garde European artists. Stieglitz achieved his goal to have photography shown alongside painting and, due to his efforts, is known as an important proponent of early modernism and not only as a promoter of photography.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles s'Avignon. 1907. Oil on Canvas

cubism/ proto-cubist inspiration from cezannes 'bathers' " what forces our interest is cezannes anxiety"-picasso means conflict between art & nature influenced by iberian sculpture seen @ louvre & african art by the french congo crude forms & expressive identity grotesque figures on the right; angular faces ushered new scheme of modern art stylistic spectrum from realism to abstraction masks on the right would turn into picassos surrealist movement in the 1920's metaphors for love and death or unconscious representation of uncertainty towards women

Alexander Rodchenko, Poster advertisement: "Books" 1925. Gouache and photomontage on paper

example of the russian avant-garde movement switching to the new soviet age The realist manifesto by Naum Gabo "Art constructed of modern materials and " in forms of space and time" A central figure in Russian Constructivism, Alexander Rodchenko rejected the established artistic conventions of self-expression and aesthetics, dedicating himself with revolutionary fervour to bringing art to the masses. produced radically abstract paintings, concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space and emphasizing dynamic diagonal compositions. denounced easel painting and fine art on idealogical grounds, Rodchenko joined the Proudctivist group in 1921 which advocated for the integration of art into everyday life Focus on graphic design, producing propoganda posters and advertisements became impressed with the photomontage from the german Dadaists and began experimenting with the new medium. Rodchenko later proclaimed, "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over."

Dziga Vertov, Film still Man with a Movie Camera, 1929

experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov and edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. Vertov's feature film, produced by the film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in the Soviet cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa.[2] It has no actors.[3] From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters", they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film. Man with a Movie Camera is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, employed or developed, such as multiple exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, match cuts, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, reversed footage, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles). Man with a Movie Camera has been interpreted as an optimistic work.[16] Jonathan Romney has called it "an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be".[17] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that the work "is visibly excited about the new medium's possibility, dense with ideas, packed with energy: it echoes Un Chien Andalou

André Masson Battle of Fishes 1926 Sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas

followed surrealist manifesto in 1924 in paris wounded during the great war and driven to express the violence it had inflicted upon him and the work dat large discovered his own visual equivalents for the automatism of the poets (refers to a set of brief unconscious behaviors. These typically last for several seconds to minutes or sometimes longer, a time during which the subject is unaware of his/her actions) Masson made Battle of Fishes by freely applying gesso to areas of the canvas, throwing sand on it, then brushing away the excess. The resulting contours suggested forms "although almost always irrational ones," according to the artist around which he rapidly sketched and applied paint directly from the tube. The image that emerged suggests a savage underwater battle between sharp-toothed fish. Masson, who was physically and spiritually wounded during World War I, joined the Surrealist group in 1924. He believed that, if left to chance, pictorial compositions would reveal the sadism of all living creatures

Georges Braque, Violin and palette, 1909-10. Oil on canvas

inspiration from cezannes geometrized compositions that led to simplified faceted forms, flattened spatial planes, and muted colors fueled by meeting with picasso where they found interest in cubist techniques objects still recognizable but fractured into multiple facets as is the surrounding space with which they merge eye moves from one plane to the next braque abandoned the fauve bright colored palette for muted colors renaissance illusionism and cubism from the nail at the top

Salvador Dali. the persistence of memory 1931 oil on canvas

surrealist art- automatism enigmatic and controversial imagery of limp watches, arid landscape, and a monstrous fetal creature, at once jewel-like and putrescent in physical substance. at their best, paintings like this encapsulates the anxieties, obsessive eroticism, and the magic of a vivid dream imagery Developed by the artist in 1930, the technique relies on self-induced paranoia and hallucinations to facilitate a work of art. This method was particularly instrumental in the creation of Dalí's "hand-painted dream photographs," a collection of works that are stylistically rooted in realism yet unrealistic in subject matter. Hard objects become inexplicably limp in this bleak and infinite dreamscape, while metal attracts ants like rotting flesh. Mastering what he called "the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling," Dalí painted with "the most imperialist fury of precision," he said, but only "to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality." It is the classic Surrealist ambition, yet some literal reality is included, too: the distant golden cliffs are the coast of Catalonia, Dalí's home. Those limp watches are as soft as overripe cheese—indeed, they picture "the camembert of time," in Dalí's phrase. Here time must lose all meaning. Permanence goes with it: ants, a common theme in Dalí's work, represent decay, particularly when they attack a gold watch, and they seem grotesquely organic. The monstrous fleshy creature draped across the painting's center is at once alien and familiar: an approximation of Dalí's own face in profile, its long eyelashes seem disturbingly insect-like or even sexual, as does what may or may not be a tongue oozing from its nose like a fat snail.

Hans Bellmer. Ball Joint. 1936 plaster

was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. surrealist object explored new eroticism in paintings, refined drawings, and provocative surrealist objects that culminated in the doll, which he showed in many controversial variations at the int. exhibition of surrealism in 1938 confused combination of limbs and erogenous areas, made from members of an articulated or jointed mannequin, and the fetishistic character of the aggressive sexual object, echo bellmers rather sadistic, unpublishable drawings of pubescent girls. the preoccupation with perverse sexuality became a noticeable feature in many surrealist works as well in many paintings by ernst their art represented the pathological side of a more usual surrealist exaltation of romantic love