Modern Art Exam 2

How did Cubism radically change painting?

Cubism paved the way for non-representational art by putting new emphasis on the unity between a depicted scene and the surface of the canvas. These experiments would be taken up by the likes of Piet Mondrian, who continued to explore their use of the grid, abstract system of signs, and shallow space.

How does Brancusi transform sculpture regarding materials and content?

Brancusi's work was largely fueled by myths, folklore, and "primitive" cultures. These traditional, old-world sources of inspiration formed a unique contrast to the often sleek appearance of his works, resulting in a distinctive blend of modernity and timelessness. The materials Brancusi used - primarily marble, stone, bronze, wood, and metal - guided the specific forms he produced. He paid close attention to his mediums, meticulously polishing pieces for days to achieve a gleam that suggested infinite continuity into the surrounding space - "as though they proceeded out from the mass into some perfect and complete existence."

Discuss Cubism as a movement.

Cubism spread quickly throughout Europe in the 1910s, as much because of its systematic approach to rendering imagery as for the openness it offered in depicting objects in new ways.

What were the characteristics, phases, influences, and repercussions of Cubism?

Cubists explored open form, piercing figures and objects by letting the space flow through them, blending background into foreground, and showing objects from various angles. Some historians have argued that these innovations represent a response to the changing experience of space, movement, and time in the modern world. This first phase of the movement was called Analytic Cubism. In the second phase of Cubism, Synthetic Cubists explored the use of non-art materials as abstract signs. Their use of newspaper would lead later historians to argue that, instead of being concerned above all with form, the artists were also acutely aware of current events, particularly WWI.

Discuss dada as an avant-gardeart movement.

Dada was the first conceptual art movement where the focus of the artists was not on crafting aesthetically pleasing objects but on making works that often upended bourgeois sensibilities and that generated difficult questions about society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art. The use of the ready-made forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society.

Discuss the aims and goals of the two German Expressionist groups

Die Brücke group sought to convey raw emotion through provocative images of modern society. They depicted scenes of city dwellers, prostitutes, and dancers in the city's streets and nightclubs, presenting the decadent underbelly of German society.Die Brücke artists used distorted forms and jarring, unnatural pigments to elicit the viewer's emotional response.The group was similarly united by a reductive and primitive aesthetic, a revival of older media and medieval German art, in which they used graphic techniques such as woodblock printing to create crude, jagged forms. Der Blaue Reiter sought to express the emotional aspects of being through highly symbolic and brightly colored renderings.

How does Marcel Duchamp's work reflect a Dada perspective?

Duchamp was the first artist to use a readymade and his choice of a urinal was guaranteed to challenge and offend even his fellow artists. By removing the urinal from its everyday environment and placing it in an art context, Duchamp was questioning basic definitions of art as well as the role of the artist in creating it.

Discuss Fauvism as a movement.

Fauvism inspired many artists in the future through abstraction and color. But the movement had a short lifespan. In their short time they extended the boundaries of representation, based in part on their exposure to non-western sources such as African art. For subject matter they turned to portraiture, still life, and landscape.

Discuss the aims and goals of the Bauhaus.

Fine art and craft were brought together with the goal of problem solving for a modern industrial society. to eliminate competitive tendencies and to foster individual creative potential and a sense of community and shared purpose.

Discuss the developments in design and their application. (Bauhaus)

Gropius's complex for the Bauhaus at Dessau has come to be seen as a landmark in modern, functionalist design.The building consists of an asphalt tiled roof, steel framework, and reinforced concrete bricks to reduce noise and protect against the weather. In addition, a glass curtain wall - a feature that would come to be typical of modernist architecture - allows in ample quantities of light. Gropius created three wings that were arranged asymmetrically to connect different workshops and dormitories within the school. The asymmetry expressed the school's functionalist approach and yet retained an elegance that showed how beauty and practicality could be combined. The sleek design and innovative use of materials in the "The Wassily Chair" are typical of the groundbreaking developments in design that made the Bauhaus famous.his design employs a minimal, sans-serif typeface. Instead of having two alphabets, one uppercase and one lowercase, Bayer reduced the typeface to only lowercase letters. He believed the uppercase was redundant, since the distinction between upper and lower case conveyed no phonetic difference. Bayer's typeface has since become synonymous with the Bauhaus, though it was never manufactured as a metal font for printers.

Discuss collage as a new artistic medium in relation to Cubist developments.

In 1912 both Picasso and Braque began to introduce foreign elements into their compositions, continuing their experiments with multiple perspectives. Picasso incorporated wall paper that imitated chair caning into Still Life with Chair-Caning (1912), thus initiating Cubist collage, and Braque began to glue newspaper to his canvases, beginning the movement's exploration of papier-colle. In part this may have resulted from the artists' growing discomfort with the radical abstraction of Analytic Cubism, though it could also be argued that these Synthetic experiments touched off an even more radical turn away from Renaissance depictions of space, and towards a more conceptual rendering of objects and figures. Picasso's experiments with sculpture are also included as part of the Synthetic Cubist style as they employ collaged elements.

How are the German Dada artists different/alike?

In 1917, Huelsenbeck returned from Zürich to found Club Dada in Berlin, which was active from 1918 to 1923, and included attendees such as Johannes Baader, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, and Raoul Hausmann.Kurt Schwitters, excluded from the Berlin group likely because of his links to Der Sturm gallery and the Expressionist style, both of which were seen as antithetical to Dada because of their Romanticism and focus on aesthetics, formed his own Dada group in Hannover in 1919, though he was its only practitioner. His Merz, as he termed his art, was less politically oriented than that of the Club Dada; his works instead examine modernist preoccupations with shape and color.

Which artists best represent DeStijl? Describe the stylistic characteristics of these groups. What were the aims and goals of these artists and their movements?

In 1917, Theo van Doesburg founded the contemporary art journal De Stijl as a means of recruiting like-minded artists in the formation of a new artistic collective that embraced an expansive notion of art, infused by utopian ideals of spiritual harmony. The journal provided the basis of the De Stijl movement, a Dutch group of artists and architects whose other leading members included Piet Mondrian, J. J. P. Oud and Vilmos Huszar. e Stijl artists espoused a visual language consisting of precisely rendered geometric forms - usually straight lines, squares, and rectangles--and primary colors. Expressing the artists' search "for the universal, as the individual was losing its significance," this austere language was meant to reveal the laws governing the harmony of the world.emerged largely in response to the horrors of World War I and the wish to remake society in its aftermath. Viewing art as a means of social and spiritual redemption, the members of De Stijl embraced a utopian vision of art and its transformative potential.

How would you describe the development of Cubism with Picasso and Braque?

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, In its radical distortion of figures, its rendering of volumes as fragmented planes, and its subdued palette, this work predicted some of the key characteristics of later Cubism. Braque, on seeing Picasso's Les Demoiselles at his studio, intensified his similar explorations in simplification of form. He made a series of landscape paintings in the summer of 1908, including Houses at L'Estaque in which trees and mountains were rendered as shaded cubes and pyramids, resembling architectural forms. Cubism was introduced to the public with Braque's one-man exhibition at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's gallery on the rue Vignon in November 1908. It was this exhibit that led French art critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe them as "bizarreries cubiques," thus giving the movement its name.

Which artists best represent Futurism? Describe the stylistic characteristics of these groups. What were the aims and goals of these artists and their movements?

Marinetti's ideas drew the support of artists Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and Carlo Carrà, who believed that they could be translated into a modern, figurative art which explored properties of space and movement. Futurism was not immediately identified with a distinctive style. Instead its adherents worked in an eclectic manner, borrowing from various aspects of Post-Impressionism, including Symbolism and Divisionism. It was not until 1911 that a distinctive Futurist style emerged, and then it was a product of Cubist influence. The Futurists were fascinated by the problems of representing modern experience, and strived to have their paintings evoke all kinds of sensations - and not merely those visible to the eye. At its best, Futurist art brings to mind the noise, heat and even the smell of the metropolis. The Futurists were fascinated by new visual technology, in particular chrono-photography, a predecessor of animation and cinema that allowed the movement of an object to be shown across a sequence of frames. This technology was an important influence on their approach to showing movement in painting, encouraging an abstract art with rhythmic, pulsating qualities.

What were the characteristics, phases, influences, and repercussions of Fauvism?

Matisse was greatly influenced by Moreau's teaching that personal expression was among the most important attributes of a great painter. The 1905 Salon d'Automne. African Art. Matisse's travelled to Morocco acquired new ideas about color and pattern that surfaced in works like The Green Line (Portrait of Madame Matisse) (1905) and Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (1907), with their radically simplified features and angular limbs inspired by African sculpture.

What is German Expressionism and why is it divided into 2 groups?

New technologies and massive urbanization efforts altered the individual's worldview, and artists reflected the psychological impact of these developments by moving away from a realistic representation of what they saw toward an emotional and psychological rendering of how the world affected them. Die Brücke: Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, and Bleyl and Der Blaue Reiter: Kandinsky, Macke, Klee, and Marc

Discuss non-representational art and how Kandinsky arrived at non-objective painting.

Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.

Discuss the development of modern sculpture after Rodin.

Rodin's achievement as a sculptor was to find a way to make the brute materiality of sculpture express the fleeting mobility of the modern individual. To achieve this, he abandoned the polished and idealized figures of academic sculpture and produced rougher, more unfinished surfaces, which better expressed restlessness, corporeality, and movement. While this often suggests psychological agitation, it also evokes the constant motion characteristic of life in modern times. Rodin would also represent the same figure multiple times in the same sculpture or fragment figures into individual body parts like hands or arms. All of these processes were encouraged by his very unclassical approach to composition, and they produced strange and jarring effects.

Discuss the role of space in relation to Cubism.

The artists abandoned perspective, blending background into foreground, and showing objects from various angles.

Discuss European art after Cubism.

The ideas in the movement also fed into more popular phenomena, like Art Deco design and architecture. Later movements such as Minimalism were also influenced by the Cubist use of the grid, and it is difficult to imagine the development of non-representational art without the experiments of the Cubists. Like other paradigm changing artistic movements of 20th-century art, like Dada and Pop, Cubism shook the foundations of traditional artmaking by turning the Renaissance tradition on its head and changing the course of art history with reverberations that continue into the postmodern era.

Which artists best represent Suprematism? Describe the stylistic characteristics of these groups. What were the aims and goals of these artists and their movements?

The seed of Constructivism was a desire to express the experience of modern life - its dynamism, its new and disorientating qualities of space and time. But also crucial was the desire to develop a new form of art more appropriate to the democratic and modernizing goals of the Russian Revolution. Constructivists were to be constructors of a new society - cultural workers on par with scientists in their search for solutions to modern problems.

What was his "Fauvism" all about?

Using bright impressionist color to communicate directly the artist's experience. Seeking personal authenticity. Freed color from its traditional role of characterizing reality.

Which artists best represent Constructivism? Describe the stylistic characteristics of these groups. What were the aims and goals of these artists and their movements?

Vladimir Tatlin is often hailed as the father of Constructivism. By 1919, both Malevich and Tatlin had achieved some prominence as representatives of different paths for the Russian avant-garde.Constructivists proposed to replace art's traditional concern with composition with a focus on construction. Objects were to be created not in order to express beauty, or the artist's outlook, or to represent the world, but to carry out a fundamental analysis of the materials and forms of art, one which might lead to the design of functional objects. For many Constructivists, this entailed an ethic of "truth to materials," the belief that materials should be employed only in accordance with their capacities, and in such a way that demonstrated the uses to which they could be put.

How did we discuss race and gender in relation to Picasso's The Women of Avignon?

colonialism. fear of the "dark continent" women confident in their body/empowerment = "scary to men"

How did he and the Fauves radically change painting?

members shared the use of intense color as a vehicle for describing light and space, and who redefined pure color and form as means of communicating the artist's emotional state. In these regards, Fauvism proved to be an important precursor to Cubism and Expressionism as well as a touchstone for future modes of abstraction. freed color from its traditional role

Discuss the aims of De Stijl.

the members of De Stijl embraced a utopian vision of art and its transformative potential.emerged largely in response to the horrors of World War I and the wish to remake society in its aftermath. seeking harmony of the world