Western Traditions II- Part Two

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

- "Primitive" art helped inspire Picasso's radical break with traditional Western norms of pictorial representation. Ancient Iberian sculptures were the sources of the features of the three young women at the left. - The striated features of the distored heads of the two young Avignon Street prostitutes at the right grew directly from Picasso's increasing fascination with African works, which he studied and collected. - By breaking the figures of the demoiselles into ambiguous planes, as if the viewer were seeing them from more than one place in space at once, Picasso disrupted the standards of Western art since the Renaissance.

Henri Rousseau, Sleeping Gypsy, 1897

- 'Sleeping Gypsy", Rousseau depicted a doll-like but menacing lion sniffing at a recumbent dreaming figure in a mysterious landscape. The painting suggests the vulnerable subconscious during sleep. - Rousseau receieved almost universally unfavorable reviews because of his lack of formal training, imperfect perspective, doll-like figures, and settings resembling constructued theater sets more than natural landscapes.

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922

- Although based on forms in the tangible world easily read as birds, Klee's Twittering Machine is fanciful vision of a mysterious place presented in a simplified, almost childlike manner. -Really liked nature and associtated and studied it as an artist -a machine that is being powered by birds

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893

- Although grounded in the real world, 'The Scream departs significantly from visual reality. Munch used color, line, and figural distortion to evoke a strong emotional response from the viewer. - Remains to this day one of the most potent symbols of the unbearable pressures of modern life on individual people. - The original title of this work was 'Despair.'

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1924

- Although not a literal depiction of a bird, Brancusi's softly curving light-reflecting abstract sculpture in polished bronze suggests a bird about to soar in free flight though the heavens. - The viewers eye is meant to follow the gleaming reflection along the delicate curves right off the tip of the work, thereby inducing a feeling of flight.

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52

- Although rooted in figuration, including pictures of female models on advertising billboards, de Kooning's Woman I displays the energetic application of pigment typical of gestural abstraction. -not turning away from figures, still using a subject -obsessed with this image-would not be satisfied with anything he made -referencing the history of art-titians venus or venus willendorf

Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958

- American Pop artist Jasper Johns wanted to draw attention to common objects that people view frequently but rarely scrutinize. He made many paintings of targets, flags, numbers, and alphabets. -Told that flag was chosen arbitrarily- it came to him in a dream -however this is satire -take something that is supposed to be powerful and make it mundane- being very cynical

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

- Boccioni's Futurist manifesto for sculpture advocated abolishing the enclosed statue. This running figure's body is so expanded that it almost disappears behind the blur of movement. - Boccioni believed that a modern sculpture should be a "translation, in plaster, bronze, glass, wood or any other material of those atmospheric planes which bind and intersect things. Let's proclaim the absolute and complete abolition of finite lines and the contained statue. Let's split open our figures and place the environment inside them. We declare that the environment must form part of the plastic whole." how very radical! - This piece highlights the formal and spatial effects of motion rather than their source, the striding human figure.

Louise Bourgeois, Cumul I, 1969

- Bourgeois's sculptures are made up of sensuous organic forms that recall the Biomorphic Surrealist forms of Miro. Although the shapes remain abstract, they refer strongly to human figures. -meditating on forms -using a material that is very traditional -Some artists think she was thinking in the same veign of Miro -thinking about insects, germs, etc -indicative of something that is living

Egon Schiele, Nude Self-Portrait, Grimacing, 1910

- Breaking sharply with the academic tradition of heroic male nudity, Schiele, a Viennese Expressionist, often portrayed himself with an emaciated body, twisting limbs, and a grimacing expression. - Schiele once spent 24 days in prison for producing what a judge ruled as pornographic art.

Mary Cassatt, The Bath, ca. 1892

- Cassatt's compositions owe much to Degas and Japanese prints, but her subjects differ from those of most Impressionists, in part because, as a woman, she could not frequent cafes with her male friends. - Cassatt's The Child Birth invites comparison with Dega's The Tub. The two paintings have much in common stylistically. As in Dega's painting, the unseen artist looks down at the bathing scene from above and, similar to the contrast between the bather and the shelf in 'The Tub', the visual solidaity of Cassatt's mother and child contrasts with the flattened patterning of the wallpaper and rug. Indeed, 'The Child's Bath' owes much ot the compositional devices of Degas as well as to Degas's source - Japanese prints. - But rather than providing a view of a nude woman unaware of the male artist-voyeur who has intruded into her private sphere, Cassatt's canvas celebrates the tender relationship between a mother and her child, both of whom gaze at their joint reflection in the tub of water.

Paul Cézanne, Basket of Apples, ca. 1895

- Cezanne's still lifes reveal his analytical approach to painting. He captured the solidity of bottles and fruit by juxtaposing color patches, but the resulting abstract shapes are not optically realistic. - In his zeal to understand three-dimensionality and to convey the placement of forms relative to the space around them, Cezanne explored his still-life arrangements from different viewpoints. This resulted in paintings that, though conceptually coherent, do not appear optically realistic.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979

- Chicago's Dinner Party honors 39 women from antiquity to 20th-century America. The triangular form and the materials - painted china and fabric - are traditionally associated with women. - The triangular white floor is inscribed with the names of 999 additional women of achievement to signify that the accomplishments of the 39 honored guests rest on a foundation that other women had laid.

Chuck Close, Big Self-Portrait, 1967-1968

- Close's goal was to translate photographic information into painted information. In his portraits, he deliberately avoided creative compositions, flattering lighting effects, and revealing facial expressions.

Roy Lichtenstein, Hopeless, 1963

- Comic books appealed to Lichtenstein because they were a mainstay of popular culture, meant to be read and discarded. The Pop artist immortalized their images on large canvases. -Uses imagery that already exists -comics start becoming very popular during the war -borrowing the technique from classical comic books -usies tiny pointalist dots to create these

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

- Dali painted "images of concrete irrationality." In this realistically rendered landscape featuring three decaying watches, he created a haunting allegory of empty space where time has ended. -They can access their subconscious via their painting -wanted to objectively show that what is subjective -Wanted to make subjective pictures of his thoughts -insect+symbol of death

Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal, 1874

- Degas favored subjects, such as the Paris ballet, that game him the opportunity to study the human body in motion. - The high viewpoint and off-center placement of figures are characteristic aspects of his work. - As in other Impressionist paintings, the cutting off of figures at the left and right enhances the sense that the viewer is witnessing a fleeting moment.

Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969

- Designed as a speaker's platform for antiwar protesters, Lipstick humorously combines phallic and militaristic imagery. Originally, the lipstick tip was soft red vinyl and had to be inflated. -wanted to combine two objects that shouldn't be together

Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1872

- Fascinated by reflected sunlight on water, Monet broke with traditional studio practice and painted his "impression" en plein air (outdoors), using short brushstrokes of pure color on canvas without any preliminary sketch. - Painting outdoors was made easier with the newly available premixed pigments conveniently sold in easily portable tubes.

Audrey Flack, Marilyn, 1977

- Flack's pioneering photorealist still lifes record objects with great optical fidelity. Marilyn alludes to Dutch vanitas paintings and incorporates multiple references to the transience of life. - Her paintings, such as Marilyn, are not simply technical exercises in recording objects in minute detail. They are also conceptual inquiries into the nautre of photography and the extent to which photography constructs an understanding of reality.

Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963

- Frankenthaler and other color-field painters poured paint onto plain canvas, allowing the pigments to soak into the fabric. Their works underscore that a painting is simply pigment on a flat surface. -Thought that color only had a very important asthetic value -Focusing on the material, not the subject-how the canvas and paint react with each other

Lucian Freud, Naked Portrait, 1972-1973

- Freud's brutally realistic portrait of an unnamed woman lying on a bed in an awkward position gives the impression that the viewer is an intruder in a private space... - ... but the setting is the artist's studio.

Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon, 1888

- Gauguin admired Japanese prints, stained glass, and cloisonne enamels. Their influences are evident in this painting of Breton women, in which firm outlines enclose large areas of unmodulated color. - Wrestling matches were regular features at the entertainment held after high mass, so Gauguin's women are spectators at a contest that was, for them, a familiar part of their culture.

Duane Hanson, Supermarket Shopper, 1970

- Hanson used molds from live models to create his Super realist life-size painted plaster sculptures. His aim was to capture the emptiness and loneliness of average Americans in familiar settings. Bravo. - When placed in a gallery folks would either mistake them for actual people, or the sculptures would fall under the uncanny valley and be super creepy.

Vincent van Gogh, Night Cafè, 1888

- In 'Night Cafe', van Gogh explored ways that colors and distorted forms can express emotions. - The thickness, shape and direction of the brushstrokes create a tactile counterpart to the intense colors. - van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother that " he wanted the painting to convey an oppressive atmosphere - a place where one can ruin one's self, go mad, or commit a crime... I want to express the power of darkness in a low drinking spot... in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace."

Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 1967

- In his art, Nauman explores his interest in language and wordplay. He describes this Conceptual neon sculpture's emphatic assertion as "a totally silly idea," but an idea he believed. - He wanted to find a medium that would be identified with a non-artistic function.

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

- In reaction to modernist abstract painting, the Midwestern Regionalism movement focused on American subjects. Wood's painting of an Iowa farmer and his daughter became an American icon. - The house behind the subjects has a small lancet window, a motif originating in Gothic architecture and associated with churches and religious piety.

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where are We Going?, 1897

- In search of a place far removed from European materialism, Gauguin moved to Tahiti, where he used native women and tropical colors to present a pessimistic view of the inevitability of the life cycle. (?) - After completing this mural-sized canvas, he attempted to commit suicide by poisoning himself, but was unsuccessful. He died a few years later, in 1903.

Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, 1924

- In this early Surrealist painting with an intentionally ambiguous title, Ernst used traditional perspective to represent the setting, but the three sketchily rendered figures belong to a dream world. -paintings come from a poem he wrote -landscape is traditionally rendered- while rest is an explosion of the irrational -grounded in contemporary psycho analytical theory -heavily influenced by freud and carl young

Ana Mendieta, Flowers on Body, 1973

- In this earth/body sculpture, Mendieta appears covered with flowers in a womblike cavity to address issues of birth and death, as well as the human connection to the earth. - Mendieta's art is lyrical and passionate and operates at the intersection of cultural, spiritual, physical, and feminist concerns.

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

- In this late work, van Gogh painted the vast night sky filled with whirling and exploding stars, the earth huddled beneath it. - The painting is an almost abstract pattern of expressive line, shape, and color. - Painted in 1889 the year before his death. Van Gogh was living at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Remy, where he had committed himself. - Although the style of Starry Night suggests a very personal vision, this work does correspond in many ways tot eh view available to the painter from the window of his room. The existence of cypress trees and the placement of the constellations have been confirmed as mathcing the view visible to van Gogh during his stay in the asylum.

Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965

- In this one-person event, Beuys coated his head with honey and gold leaf and spoke to a dead hare. Assuming the role of a shaman, he used stylized actions to evoke a sense of mystery and sacred ritual. lovely o_O

James Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), ca. 1875

- In this painting, Whistler displayed an Impressionist's interest in conveying the atmospheric effects of fireworks at night, but he also emphasized the abstract arrangement of shapes and colors. -Whistler shared the Impressionists' fondness for recording contemporary life and the sensation that color produces on the eye.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969

- Judd's Minimalist sculpture incorporates boxes fashioned from undisguised industrial materials. The artist used Plexiglas because its translucency gives the viewer access to the work's interior. -Trying to focus on the physical implements -minimalism is focused on sculpture -the building blocks of geometry created universal art making

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939

- Kahlo's deeply personal paintings touch sensual and psychological memories in her audience. Here, twin self-portraits linked by clasped hands and a common artery suggest two sides of her personality. -is considered a surrealist because of her reflection on fears and identity -self portrait (x2)- very dream like -was in pain her whole life-focus on medical paint on the body -about her national identity -giving us the version of her identity mexican/ european

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-1908

- Klimt's paintings exemplify the Viennese fin-de-siecle spirt. In 'The Kiss', he revealed only a small segment of each lover's body. The rest of the painting dissolves into shimmering, extravagant flat patterning. - This patterning has celar ties to Art Nouveau and to the Arts and Crafts movement and also evokes the conflict between two- and three- dimensionality intrinsic to the work of Degas and other modernists. - In 'The Kiss', however, those patterns also signify gender contrasts - rectangles for the man's garment, circles for the woman's. Yet the patterning also unites the two lovers into a single formal entity, underscoring the erotic union.

Nam June Paik, Video still from Global Groove, 1973

- Korean-born video artist Paik's best-known work is a cascade of fragmented sequences of performances and commercials intended as a sample of the rich worldwide television menu of the future. - They essentially collaged with video. Layering and distorting images into a single moving picture.

Henri Matisse, Woman with the Hat, 1905

- Matisee believed that color could play a primary role in conveying meaning, and consequently focused his efforts on developing this notion. - Matisse's portrayal of his wife, Amelie, features patches and splotches of seemingly arbitrary colors. - He and the other Fauve painters used color not to imitate nature but to produce a reaction in the viewer.

Henri Matisse, Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908-1909

- Matisse believed that painters should choose compositions and colors that express their feelings. Here, the table and wall seem to merge because they are the same color and have identical pattering. - Matisse eliminated the front edge of the table, rending the table, with its identical patterning, as flat as the wall behind it. The window at the upper left could also be a painting on the wall, further flattening the space. Everywhere, the colors contrast richly and intensely. - Matisse's process of overpainting reveals the importance of color for striking the right chord in the viewer. Initially, this work was predominantly green. Then Matisse repainted it blue, but blue also did not seem appropriate to him. Not until he repainted the canvas red did Matisse feel that he had found the right color for the "harmony" he wished to compose.

Joan Miró, Painting, 1933

- Miro promoted automatism, the creation of art without conscious control. He began this painting with random doodles and completed the composition with forms suggesting floating amoebic organisms. --moved into abstraction- we cannot tell what is happening at all. -this kind of abstraction was supposed to be evocative of halicination and dream state -free association -based the black spots with cutouts of machiene pieces

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930

- Mondrian's "pure plastic" paintings consist of primary colors locked into a grid of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines. By altering the grid patterns, he created a "dynamic equilibrium." - He believed that his pure plastic art expressed a universal reality.

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral: The Portal, 1894

- Monet exhibited 20 paintings of Rouen Cathedral in Paul Durand-Ruel's commercial art gallery in Paris. - The canvases show the facade at different times of the day and under various climatic conditions. - To a certain degree, the real subject is not the cathedral, which he showed only in part, but the sunlight on the building's main portal.

Berthe Morisot, Villa at the Seaside, 1874

- Morisot rejected contour lines in favor of patches of color that define the shapes of her figures. The sketchy brushstrokes used to paint the women merge with those of the water, unifying figure and ground in a striking two-dimensional composition that also captures all the freshness of a brightly lit summer day en plein air. - The people who inhabit her canvases are almost exclusively women and their children, always well dressed and thoughtful, never frivolous or objects of male desire.

Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, Eiffel Tower, 1889

- New materials and technologies and the modernist aesthetic fueled radically new architectural designs in the late 19th century. Eiffel jolted the world with the exposed iron skeleton of his tower. - Eiffel designed his best-known work, the Eiffel Tower, for an exhibition in Paris in 1889.

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-1951

- Newman's canvases consist of a signle slightly modulated color field split by "zips" (narrow bands) running from one edge of the painting to the other, energizing the color field and giving it scale. -Power of color -canvas is 18 ft high line is "zip" and supposed to be taking a break from the brightness or rest of canvas

Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, Night, 1929

- O'Keeffe's Precisionist representation of New York's soaring skyscrapers reduces the buildings to large, simple, dark planes punctured by small windows that add rhythm and energy to the image. - She held a fascination with New York and its energy.

Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946

- Painted in the aftermath of World War II, this intentionally revolting image of a powerful figure presiding over a slaughter is a reflection of war's butchery. It is Bacon's indictment of humanity. -placing blame on politician -trying to replicate chamberlain's umbrella

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

- Part of his "readymades" collection, further exploring "what is art" - Duchamp's "readymade" sculptures were mass-produced objects that the Dada artist modified. In Fountian, he conferred the status of art on a urinal and forced people to see the object in new light.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Kaufmann House (Fallingwater), 1936-1939

- Perched on a rocky hillside over a waterfall (right on top!), Wright's Fallingwater has long, sweeping lines unconfined by abrupt wall limits, reaching out and capturing the expansiveness of the natural environment. - The implied message of Wright's new architecture was space, not mass - a space designed to fit the patron's life and enclosed and divided as required.

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920

- Photographs of some of Hoch's fellow Dadaists appear among images of Marx and Lenin, and the artist juxtaposed herself with a map of Europe showing the progress of women's right to vote. - One of the Berlin Dadaists who perfected the photomontage technique was Hannah Hoch. Hoch's photomontages advanced the absurd illogic of Dada by presenting the viewer with chaotic, contradictory, and satiric compositions. They also provided scathing and insightful commentary on two of the most dramatic developments during the Weimar Republic in Germany - the redefinition of woman's social roles and the explosive growth of mass print media.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937

- Picasso used Cubist techniques, especially the fragmentation of objects and dislocation of anatomical feature, to expressive effect in this condemnation of the nazi bombing of the Basque capital. - While the painting was commissioned to voice against the nazi pilot bombings in Guernica, the painting contains no bombs and no German planes. It is a universal outcry of human grief.

Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959

- Rauschenberg's "combines" intersperse painted passages with sculptural elements. Canyon incorporates pigment on canvas with pieces of printed paper, photographs, a pillow, and a stuffed eagle. -Works with collages that are 2 d and 3 d at the same time -super dense materialistically -some people read this as a refernece to jupiter and -Want their art to have context

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Moulin de Galette, 1876

- Renoir's painting of this popular Parisian dance hall is dappled by sunlight and shade, artfully blurred into the figures to produce the effect of floating and fleeting light that many Impressionists cultivated. - A gathering of friends

Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960

- Rothko's chromatic abstractionist paintings - consisting of hazy rectangles of pure color hovering in front of a colored background - are compositionally simple but compelling visual experiences. -Thought that color was the purest form of expression -his idea was to express how colors are placed next to eachother -idea of the sublime

Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886

- Seurat introduced pointillism to the French public at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, where he displayed 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte'. According to one report, the painting attracted huge crowds, and it was impossible to get close enough to study it. - La Grande Jatte (The Big Bowl) is an island in the Seine River near Asnieres, one of late-19th-century Paris's rapidly growing industrial suburbs. It is the setting for a typically Impressionist recreational theme, populated by "modern people" from various classes and wearing different kinds of clothes. A sleeveless worker lounges in the left foreground next to a middle-class couple. Also present is a woman with a monkey on a leash who is almost certainly a prostitute (the book makes that claim without any explanation, hummh).

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #35, 1979

- Sherman here assumed a role for one of 80 photographs resembling film stills in which she addressed the way that women have traditionally been presented in Western art for the enjoyment of the "male gaze." - Sherman often reveals the constructed nature of these images by holding in her hand the shutter release cable used to take the pictures. The cord runs across the floor.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970

- Smithson used industrial equipment to create Environmental artworks by manipulating earth and rock. - Spiral Jetty is a mammoth coil of black basalt, limestone, and earth extending into Great Salt Lake.

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro (No. 49), 1940-1941

- The 49th in a series of 60 paintings documenting African American life in the North, Lawrence's depiction of a segregated dining room underscored that the migrants had not left discrimination behind. - This series called attention to a contemporaneous event - the ongoing exodus of black labor from the southern United States.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, 1912

- The Armory Show introduced European modernism to America. Duchamp's figure moving in a time continuum owes a debt to Cubism and Futurism. - The press gave his painting a hostile reception.

Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911

- The Cubists rejected the pictorial illusionism that had dominated Western art for centuries. Here, Braque concentrated on dissecting form and placing it in dynamic interaction with space. - The subject is a Portuguese musician whom the artist recalled seeing years earlier in a bar in Marseilles. Braque dissected the man and his instrument and placed the resulting forms in dynamic interaction with the space around them. - Unlike the Fauves and German Expressionists, who used vibrant colors, the Cubists chose subdued hues - here solely brown tones - in order to focus attention on forms.

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936

- The Surrealists loved the concrete tangibility of sculpture, which made their art even more disquieting. Oppenheim's fur-covered object captures the Surrealist flair for magical transformation. -came up with this idea when she was having lunch with Picasso -Wants the viewer to feel unteathered and altered states of mind, access our basic state of minds.

Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, Pompidou, 1977

- The architects fully exposed the anatomy of this six-level building, as in the century-earlier Crystal Palace - and color-coded the internal parts according to function, as in a factory. Red for movement of people, green for water, blue for air-conditioning, and yellow for electricity.

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877

- The brushwork bears little resemblance to Monet's or Manet' broken brushstrokes, but the subject is unmistakably Impressionist. - Considered the buildings and streets of contemporary Paris worthy subjects for paintings. - The woman is wearing a black veil, meaning she is an upper class citizen.

Èdouard Manet, A bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882

- The central figure in A Bar at the Folies-Bergere is a young barmaid who looks out from the canvas but seems detached both from the viewer and the gentleman in a top hat who may be propositioning her. - In accord with modernist principles, Manet called attention to the canvas surface by creating spatial inconsistencies, such as the relationship between the barmaid and her apparent reflection in the mirror. - The Folies-Bergere was a popular cafe and music hall where Parisians enjoyed their leisure - a characteristic Impressionist subject that broke sharply with tradition, as did Manet's sketchy application of paint.

Diane Arbus, Child with Toy Hand Grenade, New York, New York, 1962

- The contact sheet is revealing with regards to Arbus' working method. She engages with the boy while moving around him, saying she was trying to find the right angle. The sequence of shots she took depicts a really quite ordinary boy who just shows off for the camera. However, the published single image belies this by concentrating on a freakish posture - an editorial choice typical for Arbus who would invariably pick the most expressive image, thereby frequently suggesting an extreme situation.

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-1929

- The discrepancy between Magritte's meticulously painted briar pipe and his caption, " this is not a pipe," challenges the viewer's reliance on the conscious and rational in the reading of visual art. "This is not a pipe" -pun or a joke about art -Calling into question the entire history of art -making the connection that art is deceitful

Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956

- The fantasy interior in Hamilton's collage of figures and objects cut from glossy magazines reflects the values of modern consumer culture. Toying with mass-media imagery typifies British Pop Art. -What we associate with Americana -this is considered the first ideration of pop art -see consumer culture is a thing that effects every level of society -pop art is the coummulation of ads and advertisements -When nothing becomes important anymore because everything is so mass produced

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942

- The seeming indifference of Hopper's characters to one another, and the echoing spaces surrounding them, evoke the overwhelming loneliness and isolation of Depression-era life in the United States. - The viewer glimpses the lighted interior through huge plate-glass windows, which lend the inner space the paradoxical sense of being both a safe refuge and a vulnerable place for the three customers and the man behind the counter.

Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child, 1903

- The theme of the mother mourning over her dead child comes from images of the Pieta in Christian art, but Kollwitz transformed it into a powerful universal statement of maternal loss and grief. - This image uses etching and lithography. Killwitz explored a range of printmaking techniques, including woodcut, lithography and etching.

Vassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28, 1912

- The theories of Einstein and Ruthford convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance. He was one of the first painters to reject representation in flavor of abstraction for his canvases. - A true intellectual, widely read in philosophy, religion, history, and other arts, especially music, Kandinsky was also one of the few early modernist artists to read with comprehension the new scientific theories of the era.

Edgar Degas, The Tub, 1886

- The tub reveals the influence of Japanese prints, especially the sharp angles that artist such as Kiyonaga used in representing figures. Degas translated his Japanese model into the impressionist mode. - Degas's combination of the fully modeled figure of the bather and the flatness of the tub and shelf creates a visual perplexity fully consistent with the modernist exploration of the tension between illusionism and the acknowledgment that painting is a two-dimensional art form.

Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing No. 5, 1947

- The writer Jean-Paul Sartre saw Giacometti's thin and virtually featureless sculpted figures as the personification of existentialist human - alienated, solitary, and lost in the world's immensity. -uses bronze as his medium -resisting the mass that the figure and material has

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair-Caning, 1912

- This painting includes a piece of oilcloth imprinted with the photolithographed pattern of a cane chair seat. Framed with a piece of rope, the still life challenges the viewer's understanding of reality. - This work moved Cubism into a new form, Synthetic Cubism. In this later Cubist style, instead of dissecting forms, artists constructed paintings and drawings from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials. - The letters JOU, which appear in many Cubist paintings, formed part of the masthead of the daily French newspapers (journaux) often found among the objects represented. Picasso and Braque especially delighted in the punning reference to jouer and jouir - the French verbs meaning "to play" and "to enjoy."

Georges Braque, Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, Glass, 1913

- This uses a type of collage called papier colle (stuck paper) in which the artist glues assorted paper shapes to a drawing or painting. - This Cubist collage of glued paper is a visual game to be deciphered. The pipe in the foreground, for example, seems to lie on the newspaper, but it is cutout revealing the canvas surface.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1892-1895

- Toulouse- Lautrec devoted his brief career to depicting the bohemian lifestyle of Paris at night. - He included himself in the background - the diminutive man wearing a derby hat accompanying the very tall man, his cousin). - 'At the Moulin Rouge' reveals the influences of Degas, of Japanese prints, and of photography in the oblique and asymmetrical composition, the spatial diagonals, and the strong line patterns with added dissonant colors.

Frank Llyod Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1943-1959

- Using reinforced concrete almost as a sculptor might use resilient clay, Wright designed a snail shell-shaped museum with a winding, gently inclined interior ramp for the display of artworks. - Frank often described his architecture as "organic."

Andy Warhol, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962

- Warhol was the quintessential American Pop artist. Here, he selected an icon of mass-produced consumer culture and then multiplied it, reflecting Coke's omnipresence in American society. -pop art was the way in which he tried to express his ideas about American Culture -was very into print making -Called everything a factory

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

- When it was in the gallery being moved it fell over and the glass shattered, but he put every piece of glass back together and said he liked it better that way- that that "finished" the piece - The Large Glass is a simultaneously playful and serious examination of humans as machines. The bride is a motor fueled by "love gasoline," and the male figures in the lower half also move mechanically.

Man Ray, Cadeau (Gifts), ca. 1958

- With characteristic Dada humor, the American artist Man Ray equipped a laundry iron with a row of wicked-looking spikes, subverting its proper function of smoothing and pressing. - Similar to "readymade" art - Made for a friend when had nothing to bring to a party.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House, 1907-1909

-A nonsymmetrical design interacting spatially with its natural surroundings. - Made for "free" individuals to move freely. The building's asymmetrical design is grounded by a central fireplace.

Edward Weston, Pepper No. 30, 1930

-Did a series of photographs of peppers -wanted to capture the most interesting figures, often resembling human bodies.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907

-Does not become an art medium for a while -gallery owner (216) -wants to prove to the world that photography is art -were taken organically

Jackson Pollock, Number I, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950

-Pollock innovated painting by not using an easel, he would lay his canvas on the ground and drop paint on the campus - called "Jack the dripper" lol -turning away from anything realistic -would lay canvas on the floor-final ends up being his hand created action painting

Gino Severini, Armored Train, 1915

-Severini's glistening armored train with protruding cannon reflects the Futurist faith in the cleansing action of war. The painting captures the dynamism and motion central to the Futurist manifesto. - Death and destruction - the tragic consequences of war - are absent from Severini's paintings.

Alexander Calder, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, 1939

-Started out as an engineer -Comissioned for the MOMA -first museum in the world dedicated to modern art -pointing to natural forms

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1939

-abstract artist that strips away all known things. -Still some teather to represnetation-at one point there was a point of reference -still easy read -really indebted to the material of elm -body is indacative of the body in yorkshire of hills -inovation with negative space-with the idea of void

Eva Hesse, Hang-Up, 1965-1966

-everything is boiled down to its most basic shape and will still elicit a response. -jewish artist grew up in germany during the nazi revolution -For her the artwork is the frame

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962

-owned the "factory" -wanted to show the massive effects of consumerism through the print technique

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley, 1935

-part of Rossevelts government project -document how bad the conditions were for the workers -At this camp the workers are dying -People went to feed the workers after they are able to see this in the paper

Pablo Picasso, Maquette for Guitar, 1912

-trying to learn what is the "essence" of things, how a guitar can be recognizable as a guitar without it being a guitar- that one pice of paper can make a difference - In this model for a sculpture of sheet metal, picasso presented what is essentially a cutaway view of a guitar, enabling the viewer to examine both surface and interior space, mass and void.

Modernism

A movement in Western art that developed in the second half of the 19th century and sought to capture the images and sensibilities of the age. Modernist art goes beyond simply dealing with the present and involves the artist's critical examination of the premises of art itself.

Post-Modernism

A reaction against modernist formalism, which was seen as elitist. Far more encompassing and accepting than the more rigid confines of modernist practice, postmodernism offers something for everyone by accommodating a wide range of styles, subjects, and formats, from traditional easel painting to installation and from abstraction to illusionistic scenes. Postmodern art often includes irony or reveals a self-conscious awareness of the position of the artist in the history of art.

Pointillism/Divisionism

A system of painting devised by the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat. The artist separates color onto its component parts and then applies the component colors to the canvas in tiny dots (points). The image becomes comprehensible.

Action-Painting

Also called gestural apstraction. The kind of Abstract Expressionism practiced by Jackson Pollock, in which the emphasis was on the creation process, the artist's gesture in making art. Pollock poured liquid paint in linear webs on his canvases, which he laid out on the floor, thereby physically surrounding himself in the painting during its creation.

Site-Specificity

Art created for a specific location.

Avant-garde

French, "advance guard" (in a platoon). Late-19th-and-20th-century artists who emphasized innovation and challenged established convention in their work. Also used as an adjective.

Fin-de-siecle

French, "end of the century." A period in Western cultureal history from the end of the 19th century until just before World War I, when decadence and indulgence masked anxiety about an uncertain future.

En Plein Air

Painting "In the open air"

Semiotics

The study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

Readymade

everyday object selected and designated as art; the name was coined by the French artist Marcel Duchamp.