Modern Art Test #2

The Fauves

A French term meaning "wild beast" and descriptive of an artistic style characterized by the use of bright and intense expressionistic color schemes.

Expressionism

A form of art in which the artist depicts the inner essence of man and projects his view of the world as colored by that essence.

The Chicago School

A school of architecture dedicated to the design of buildings whose form expressed, rather than masked, their structure and function.

Taylorism

A set of ideas, also referred to as "scientific management," developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, involving simple, coordinated operations in industry.

Suprematism

A type of art formulated by Kazimir Malevich to convey his belief that the supreme reality in the world is pure feeling, which attaches to no object and thus calls for new, nonobjective forms in art shapes not related to objects in the visible world.

Franz Marc. Stables. 1913 (Der Blaue Reiter)

Absorbing ideas and forms of the cubist and finding them applicable to his own concepts of the mystery and poetry of color. Combined earlier curvilinear patterns with a new rectangular geometry. Forms composes parallel to the picture plane rather than titled in depth.

Pablo Picasso. Glass of Absinthe. 1914 (synthetic cubism)

Adapts objects from the real world for expressive purposes in the realm of art. Lack of discrimination between the "high" art media of painting and sculpture and the "low" ephemera of the material world remained a characteristic of picasso's sculpture was relevant for artists in the 50s and 60s

Henri Matisse. Blue Nude Memory of Biskra. 1907. (fauve)

African influence. Variation of classic venus pose. Dynamic angles with posing. "I do not create a woman I create a picture". Painting in his own time than those of the past.

Emile Nolde, The Last Supper, 1909 (Die Brücke)

Among first visionary religious paintings. Crammed into practically non-existent space; reds and yellow greens of faces flaring like torches out of the surrounding shadow. Faces derive from skull-like masks from Ensor's style. Yet each figure is individual involved in extreme drama.

Primitivism

An early 20th century artistic movement which was attracted to the directness, instinctivness and exoticism nonurban cultures

Futurism

An early-20th-century Italian art movement that championed war as a cleansing agent and that celebrated the speed and dynamism of modern technology.

Analytic vs. Synthetic Cubism

Analytic- breaking down Synthetic- building up

Vorticism

Avant-garde movement coined by Ezra Pound which is highly abstract and modern, focusing on harsh lines and angles, devoting subject matter to urban areas and history. Predominantly visual art.

Der Blaue Reiter

Blue Rider a German group who believed in charging form and color with a purely spiritual meaning eliminating all resemblance to the physical world (Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc)

Ernst Barlach, The Avenger, 1914

Capable of works of sweepings power and the integration in a single image of humor, pathos, and primitive tradgedy. Socially conscious expressionism that used the outer forms of contemporary experiment for narrative purposes.

Orphism

Color Cubism kaleidoscopic array of colored shards Robert Delauney(The Red Tower)

Constantin Brancusi. The Kiss. 1916

Depicts simplicity of couple embracing one another a subject Brancusi first presented in 1909. Though a subject of one of Rodin's famous pieces, the blockish forms of Brancusi breaks the Rodinesque tradition clear.

Henri Matisse, The Backs. 1909

Development of the theme stated in Two Women. Using vertical surface like that of a painting. From Back I where the model is a representational form (feeling matisse had for sculptural form) Back II reflecting interest in cubism. Back III & IV are in the form of abstract sculpture. Cubist acknowledgement.

Egon Schiele, Schiele, Drawing a Nude Model before a Mirror, 1910

Displays extraordinary natural skills as a draftsman. Familiar theme of the artist and model, but creates atmosphere of psychological tension and explicit sexuality.

Jacques Lipchitz. Man with a guitar. 1915. (synthetic cubism)

Edged to brink of abstraction. Austere rendition of a familiar cubist theme and derived from the artist's earlier and more legible wood constructions of detachable figures. Analogy between the guitar and human anatomy.

Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses, 1911 (Der Blaue Reiter)

Enthusiastic for rich colors and beauty were expressive of the harmonies he was seeking. Though the modeling of the animals gives them the effect of sculptured relief projecting from a uniform background, there is no real spatial difference between the creatures and environment.

Henri Matisse, The Dance 1909

Figures boldy outlined and isolated them against a ground of intense color. Motif first used by Matisse as we have seen-colors limited to intense green/blue/red sealed into foreground. Visual vibrations to make the entire surface dance. Matisse on Fauvism- "the courage to return to a purity of means"

Lyonel Feininger. Harbor Mole. 1913 (Der Blaue Reiter)

Fond of Marc's cubism. Scene of a breakwater into a scintillating interplay of color facets, geometric in outline but given a sense of rapid changes by transparent, delicately graded color areas. Accomplished approach to continue with variations; strong straight line structure played against senuous and softly luminous color. Shifting between abstarct and representation created a dynamic tension in his paintings.

The Lumière Brothers

French inventors and pioneer manufacturers of photographic equipment who devised an early motion-picture camera and projector called the Cinématographe

Henri Matisse, The Open Window, 1905 (fauve)

Fully developed example of his favorited theme. Left patches of unpainted canvas to reinforce the impact of the brushstrokes. Beyond neo-impression and into abstraction.

Paula Modersohn-Becker. Self-Portrait on 6th Wedding Anniversary. 1906 (Die Brücke)

Fuses conventional theme of the artist's self-portrait with the favored modernist motif of the nude woman. Presents her own body with personality, agency, and creativity. Asserts her body as a course for artistic creation and creation of life itself. Reclaims female nude as a fully human subject and not a formal motif like a still life.

Filippo Marinetti

Futurist Manifesto

Henri Matisse. The Green Line. 1905. (fauve)

Gauguin- "Artist is free to use color independently of natural appearance building a structure of abstract shapes and colors shapes foreign to the basis of the structure". Shocking because the subject is familiar rather than exotic.

Georges Rouault. The Old King 1916

Geometrically abstract and colors are intensified to achieve glow of stained glass. Captures Rembrandt's style and mood.

Constantin Brancusi. Sleeping Muse I. 1909

Head transformed into egg shape- soft feature sculpted sharply?

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 (proto-cubist)

Image that in the iconoclastic spirit of modernism, virtually shattered ever preceding pictorial and iconographical convention. Confrontational. Faces inspired from African masks.

Rayonism

Inspired by cubism and began in Russia as an experiment in pure abstraction; employed linear "rays" of light that produced facets of color and light on the canvas; a short-lived movement of a few artist over a period of just a few years.

Metaphysical School

Interest in symbolic meanings beyond surface appearances of objects

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912 (Synthetic cubsim)

Jou-illusionism is a game "art is a lie to understand the truth" Challenged most fundamental convention.

Vasily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913 (Der Blaue Reiter)

Kandinsky compositions generally revolve around themes of cosmic conflict and renewal (specifically the Deluge from the biblical Book of Genesis and the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation-from cataclysm he believed a rebirth in a spiritually cleanses world. There are recognizable forms yet Kandinsky lets them get lost among the brilliant colors. Though prepared, he preserved a sense of spontaneous, unpremeditated freedom.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Seated Youth, 1917

Last monumental work. Utilizing elongation (referencing Byzantine/Romanesque) to convey a sense of contemplation and withdrawal. Represents trauma and sadness Lehmbruck experienced in Germany during WWI

Maurice de Vlaminck. Portrait of Derain. 1906.

Likeness of portraits the Fauves made of eachother.

Georges Rouault. Jesus Reviled, from the Miserere, 1914

Miserere series commissioned by Vollard. Some images accompanying text are Christian while others are interpreted broadly as commentaries on contemporary social conditions and WWI.

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space 1925

Obsessed with the idea of conveying the essence of flight. Becomes less of a representation of a bird's shape to more a trajectory through the air. Soaring vertically/ transition between the mundane physical world and the spiritual realm of bird.

André Derain. London Bridge. 1906. (Neo-impressionism?)

Painted in trip commissioned by Ambroise Vollard who wanted Derain to make paintings that capture special atmosphere of London.

Gabriele Münter. Portrait of Friends. 1908. (Der Blaue Reiter)

Portrait and friends of fellow artists. Thick lines subdivide the scene into discrete areas of vibrant Fauve color, emulating the surface effects and spatial compression of Hinterglasmalerei. Functions as an expressionist portrait. Color and pose suggest a momentary alienation from one another.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Self-Portrait with Monocle. 1910

Portrayed himself as the very image of the arrogant young Expressionist. Boldest colorist. Member of Die Brücke who moved furthest and most convincingly in the direction of abstract structure.

Henri Matisse, Red Studio, 1911

Principle of a single, unified color that he had explored in Harmony in Red. Only given volumetric definition by the use of white lines along the red. Le Luxe II in upper right.

Constantin Brancusi. Endless Column. 1937. Romania

Recalls ancient obelisks but also draws upon forms in Romanian folk art. Rhomboid shapes began as pedestal/free standing sculpture. Reliance upon repeated modules became greatly important for minimalist artists of the 1960s.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, 1908 (Die Brücke)

Recording of streets and inhabitants of the city (nightclubs, cabarets and circuses). Curvilinear figures without individual motive, drifting in a world of dreams.

Henri Matisse. Reclining Nude. 1906-1907. Bronze. (fauve)

Referenced from Blue Nude and abstracted even further.

Cubo-Futurism

Russian avant-garde art movement in the 1910s that emerged as an offshoot of European Futurism and Cubism.

Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905 (Rose Period)

Settled on an image devoid of activity, in which the characters, despite their physical proximity, hardly take note of one another. Poetry/Mystery.

Raoul Dufy, Street Decked with Flags, Le Havre, 1906

Takes subject favored by impressionist but abstract geometric pattern to flags.

Autochromes

The first color photographic process, a one of a kind image on glass, was invented by the Lumiere Brothers.

Henri Matisse. The Joy of Life. 1905-06. (fauve)

Transformative/moment he finds his way. Reminiscence of past art, references found in the figures and landscape. Sensual Lagour. Juxtaposition of things conceived independently but arranged together.

Oskar Kokoschka. The Tempest. 1914

Two figures are swept with through a dream landscape of cold blue mountains and valleys lit only by a gleam of shadowed moon. "Express the mood by reliving it"

Pablo Picasso. La Vie. 1903 (Blue Period)

Two women giving contradictory views of women being either a saint or seductress. Blue gives off melancholic atmosphere.

Pablo Picasso. Gertrude Stein. 1905 (First Classical)

Unconventional pose for a female sitter- conveys the self-assured nature of a woman who freely proclaimed her own artistic genius. Space is powerful.

Paul Klee. Hammamet with its Mosque. 1914 (Der Blaue Reiter)

While in North Africa, he was affected by the brilliance of the region's light and the color/clarity of the atmosphere. Watercolor to a form of semi-abstract color pattern based on a Cubist grid

Worpswede

a town in germany where german expressionists met up

paper collés

a type of collage and collaging technique in which paper is adhered to a flat mount. ... As the term papier collé is not commonly used, this type of work is often simply called collage.

Constructivism

an extension of symbolic interaction theory which proposes that reality is what humans cognitively construct it to be

Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass, 1912 (Synthetic cubsim)

decorative wallpaper establishing background for still life Incomplete-must construct its shape by decoding the signs the artist provides

Georges Braque, Houses at L'Estaque, 1908

detailed become simplified and geometric experienced at close range. wished to establish a background plane while advancing the picture toward myself bit by bit. forms seem to come forward.

Georges Braque. Violen and Palette. 1909 (analytic cubism)

interstices between objects harden into painted shards, causing space to appear as concrete as the depicted objects. "materialization of a new space"- essence of cubism

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911

reordering the elements of the physical world within the shallow depths of their respective compositions using the human figure as a pretext for an elaborate scaffolding of shifting, interpenetrating planes. Descending diagonal lines help concentrate the geometric structure to center of picture. Variations with values create imperceptible change and movement in surface and depth.

trompe l'oeil

visual illusion in art, especially as used to trick the eye into perceiving a painted detail as a three-dimensional object.