ARS 102- Mod 6Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889

Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie, 1911-12

"I love her very much and I will write this in my paintings," Picasso, referring to his lover Marcelle Humbert, revealed in a letter. By inscribing "MA JOLIE" (my pretty one) on the bottom of this painting, the first of at least twelve works on which he did so, he privately referenced his nickname for Humbert while publicly alluding to the refrain of a popular music-hall song. These highly legible words, along with the nearby treble clef and musical staff, form a striking contrast to the near-indecipherable image of a figure that disappears into a network of flickering, semitransparent planes.

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939

- Surrealist - Oil on canvas - Depicts Frida torn between her two cultural identities. Her father was Jewish-Hungarian and her mother was an indigenous Mexican. Her husband, Diego Rivera, wanted her to suppress her Mexican side. - On her European side her heart is cut open and a vein goes down to her arm to a pair of scissors which have cut it short. On her Mexican side is a full heart and a vein that runs down her arm to a portrait of her husband. - Dreamlike setting. Cloud-filled background.

Return to order (rappel à l'order)

A conservative cultural movement in France in the years following World War I. This movement was defined by a renewed interest in classicism, nationalism, and a rejection of the avant-garde

Harlem Renaissance

A period in the 1920s when African-American achievements in art and music and literature flourished

New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)

A post-World War I German art movement that rebelled against German Expressionism and focused on the detailed representation of objects and figures.

Aaron Douglas, Aspiration, 1936

Created for Texas Centennial of 1936• Shift from agrarian labor to the industrialized north• The shackled arms of slaves, rising from wavelike curves, evoke the transatlantic passage of slave ships. • The five-pointed stars symbolize Texas—the Lone Star State—but also recall the North Star that guided escaped slaves to freedom before the Civil War. "Aspiration," created for the Texas Centennial of 1936, conveys the artist's perception of a link between African/Egyptian and African American cultures—rejecting European claims to Egypt's historical legacy. Aaron Douglas's painting depicts multiple progressions—from slavery to freedom, and from the agrarian or sharecropper labor of the South to the industrial labor of the North—along with the triumph of freedom over racism and subjugation. The shackled arms rising from wave-like curves evoke the transatlantic passage of slave ships.The five-pointed stars symbolize Texas—the Lone Star State—but also recall the North Star that guided fugitives from slavery to freedom before the Civil War. The seated figure of Egypt holding a book and the silhouettes of pyramids represent the cultural contributions of ancient African/Egyptian civilization. The two twentieth-century African American men hold attributes of education and gaze upward to a city whose futuristic skyscrapers symbolize human aspiration.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

Cubism 1907-1920s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective in painting. It depicts five naked women composed of flat, splintered planes whose faces were inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks. The compressed space they inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards, while a slice of melon in the still life at the bottom of the composition teeters on an upturned tabletop. Picasso unveiled the monumental painting in his Paris studio after months of revision. The Avignon of the work's title is a reference to a street in Barcelona famed for its brothels.

Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry murals, 1932

East wall The space he was given to paint was aligned on an east/west/north/south axis. Rivera utilized this architectural orientation in a symbolic way. On the east wall, the direction of the sunrise, beginnings, new life, he represented a child in the bulb of a plant cradled by two plowshares and framed on either side by hefty nudes holding grain and fruit—symbolizing bountiful harvests. These panels introduce some of the world's earliest technology in agriculture. North and south walls The manufacture of the 1932 Ford V-8 at the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant is captured in the two major panels on the north and south walls. When the Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit in 1932 to paint these walls, the city was a leading industrial center of the world. It was also the city that was hit the hardest by the Great Depression the Battle of the Overpass. The most controversial panel in 1932 was this small right hand panel on the north wall. Here a child is vaccinated in a medical laboratory surrounded by the animals that provided the serum. Rivera took this composition from Christian nativity scenes where the baby Jesus is attended to by Mary and Joseph and honored by three wise men. To Rivera, medical technology would be the new savior of mankind. He based the image of the child on the kidnapped Lindberg baby, Mary is based on the popular movie star of the time, Jean Harlow, and the doctor is a portrait of the museum director, William Valentiner. The three scientist/wise men he referred to as a Catholic, Protestant and a Jew—ecumenical wise/medical men.

Mayo, Coup des Bâtons, 1937

Egyptian collective called Art et Liberté sought to address the same societal ills, violence and political causes their European counterparts were intent on uncovering through their new language café scene from Cairo in Egypt, from 1937, a sight that many people would have recognized. These types of cafes were populated by intellectuals and critics of the situation in Egypt. At the time, the bourgeois in Egypt had all the wealth, and although it was no longer a British colony, Egyptians were still under the influence of Britain so they had to divert their resources to help with the war. Cairo was littered with a lot of soldiers and the social-political situation was quite tense. Coups de Bâtons is made up of peasant pastels colors—the blue sky looks almost like a summer or a spring day. But in the foreground, you can see a jumble of contorted human-like figures with stretched limbs. They almost seem to be broken. That's when you notice it's a painting of the dispersal of crowds by police brutality. Both labor and student unions were protesting against how the poor were being treated, and the police would strike people with sticks to try and disperse crowds, You can see these batons being held up, that's what the title of the work refers to, and people being strangled with ties, chairs being held up in the air and stones being thrown. It's a really chaotic scene.

Krou mask, 19th-mid-20th century

Extraordinary 6-eyed African (Male) Grebo Kru Mask - Used for ceremonies - Late 19th / Early 20th Century - Origin Ivory Coast - Represents a monster / bird like figure - Beautiful geometric lines and eyes filled with pigments, finished with bird feathers on top -picasso and cubist took inspo from this

James Van der Zee, Couple in Racoon Coats, 1932

Posed on a residential street in Harlem, New York, this stylish couple is cocooned in signifiers of success: their luxurious automobile, his-and-hers raccoon coats, and serene expressions together create a powerful aura of contentment. Their Cadillac V-16, a top-of-the-line model sold from 1930 to 1940, is the star of the picture. Both expensive and exclusive—only about four thousand were made—each car came with a chassis customized for its owner. The lustrous paint and gleaming chrome of this convertible exemplify the couple's wealth and security, rarities in the United States during the Great Depression. Van Der Zee was the most successful portrait photographer working in Harlem in the 1920s and '30s. During that period, known as the Harlem Renaissance, scores of people settled in this Manhattan neighborhood, which served as a center of black culture in the United States. Here they found like-minded cosmopolitan urbanites who wanted to record their material comforts, social allegiances, and significant life events through photography. While many sitters had their pictures taken in Van Der Zee's well-accessorized studio, other clients requested that the photographer come to their houses, churches, or schools to document weddings, baptisms, sports leagues, and social organizations. The handsome pair captured here looks wholly at home on West 127th Street. From the shimmer of her shoes to the line of light bouncing off his hat brim, every detail of their image exudes polish and prosperity.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889

Post-Impressionism 1880s-1914 n creating this image of the night sky—dominated by the bright moon at right and Venus at center left—van Gogh heralded modern painting's new embrace of mood, expression, symbol, and sentiment. Inspired by the view from his window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where the artist spent twelve months in 1889-90 seeking reprieve from his mental illnesses, The Starry Night (made in mid-June) is both an exercise in observation and a clear departure from it. The vision took place at night, yet the painting, among hundreds of artworks van Gogh made that year, was created in several sessions during the day, under entirely different atmospheric conditions. The picturesque village nestled below the hills was based on other views—it could not be seen from his window—and the cypress at left appears much closer than it was. And although certain features of the sky have been reconstructed as observed, the artist altered celestial shapes and added a sense of glow. Van Gogh assigned an emotional language to night and nature that took them far from their actual appearances. Dominated by vivid blues and yellows applied with gestural verve and immediacy, The Starry Night also demonstrates how inseparable van Gogh's vision was from the new procedures of painting he had devised, in which color and paint describe a world outside the artwork even as they telegraph their own status as, merely, color and paint.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Dresden, 1908

Street, Dresden is Kirchner's bold, discomfiting attempt to render the jarring experience of modern urban bustle. The scene radiates tension. Its packed pedestrians are locked in a constricting space; the plane of the sidewalk, in an unsettlingly intense pink (part of a palette of shrill and clashing colors), slopes steeply upward, and the exit to the rear is blocked by a trolley car. The street—Dresden's fashionable Königstrasse—is crowded, even claustrophobically so, yet everyone seems alone. The women at right, one clutching her purse, the other her skirt, are holding themselves in, and their faces are expressionless, almost masklike. A little girl is dwarfed by her hat, one in a network of eddying, whorling shapes that entwine and enmesh the human figures. Developing in parallel with the French Fauves, and influenced by them and by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, the German artists of Die Brücke (The Bridge), an association cofounded by Kirchner, explored the expressive possibilities of color, form, and composition in creating images of contemporary life. Street, Dresden is a bold expression of the intensity, dissonance, and anxiety of the modern city.

Surrealism

a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Cubism

an early 20th-century style and movement in art, especially painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage.

Dada

artistic movement in which artists rejected tradition and produced works that often shocked their viewers

Mexican Muralism

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

Primitivism in Art

new way of looking at and appropriating the forms of so-called "primitive" art and played a large role in radically changing the direction of European and American painting at the turn of the 20th century. Primitivism was not so much an artistic movement but a trend among diverse modern artists in many countries who were looking to the past and to distant cultures for new artistic sources in the face of increasing industrialization and urbanization. Beginning at the end of the 19th century, the influx of tribal arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native Americans into Europe offered artists a new visual vocabulary to explore. In many ways, Primitivism provided artists a way to critique the stagnant traditions of European painting. Primitive art's use of simpler shapes and more abstract figures differed significantly from traditional European styles of representation, and modern artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse used these forms to revolutionize painting and sculpture.

Automatism

the avoidance of conscious intention in producing works of art, especially by using mechanical techniques or subconscious associations.

Expressionism Art

the distortion of form and the deployment of strong colors to convey a variety of anxieties and yearnings Early 20th Century Important work: The Scream by Edvard Munch

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

the image of Kaiser Wilhelm II emerges, standing tall in his imperial finery, looming indignantly over the right half of the composition. Surrounded by disembodied heads and bodies, text fragments, bits of machinery, buildings, maps, and crowds, the Kaiser seems to fade into the background. Elsewhere, women dance, skate, and climb, while men stand at attention or are made to participate, unwittingly, in nonsensical and sometimes violent activities. This densely populated work is difficult, if not impossible, to take in all at once. Though complex, it is worth digging in here to understand the cast of characters and what they tell us about the work and the larger thematics of Berlin Dada This cut-and-paste aesthetic was wholly embraced by Berlin Dada as a form of political and social critique. The new process allowed the group to comment on the newly established Weimar Republic