Art 188

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907 [Cubism]

Picasso turned Matisse's sensuality into violent pornography. Painted in Paris although he is Spanish Title translated to "Young ladies of Avignon" Refers to a Barcelona street associated with prostitution We are looking at a brothel, the idea of rendering a women who is available to the male viewer but within a context that goes back to Degas, Manet, or even Titian For many, this painting is seen as a break with the 500 years of European painting that begins with the Renaissance Many see this as the foundation on which Cubism is built A radial break that points to the future Radial break with conventions of representation that had for so long been accepted in the West about how you make a body in space and create space No linear perspective or chiaroscuro He used to love chiaroscuro but now he has found the formal means to convey the ideas that were behind this painting about sexuality, the female nude, sexually transmitted diseases A confrontational painting The women have their gazed turned outward engaging the viewer directly The faces of the women on the right are often seen as representations of African Masks that we know Picasso was then looking at The figure on the left is an archaic figure, going back to ancient spain and liberian art before the classical period We look at art and expect stylistic coherence but here we have this agglomeration of styles, a kind of invention, he is allowing his laboratory to be exposed to us There is a physical confrontation, there is a danger here The figures are close to us, space has become this palpable 3d fractured planes The curtains that seem to thread in between the figures are pressed right up against them, no space behind or between.....there is still some sense of illusion, there is still some shadow and highlighting but he has only created an illusion that goes back into space a few inches Cubism is the deconstruction of 3d form, shattening that form and then placing those fragments back on a 2d surface Thinking of this with cubism in mind, it makes us think of the central figure as one that we are both looking across at but also looking down at. Multiple perspectives Looking at afircan masks, interested in them for their formal qualities and formal inventiveness, also for their otherness This idea of needing to go outside the Western tradition in order to express what the early 20th century and the late 19th century felt like is important This tendency toward expressing the flatness of the picture plane, not denying it by creating this false illusion--important at the time period...disliked by many at the time who were not used to this Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was constructed in response to several significant sources. "creative vacuum cleaner," sucking up every new idea that he came across. First amongst these was his confrontation with Cézanne's great achievement at the posthumous retrospective mounted in Paris a year after the artist's death in 1907. Element that tells us that our presence is apart of the scene Looking out at us and reacting to our presence The food is close to us, the table is supposed to be seen in a 3d perspective in front of the viewer Cubism is deliberately trying to explore the phenomenon of visual persecution, fractured view He took a fascination about masks operating as abstract representations of faces New ways of representing people Movement towards abstraction The cubists artists were trying to push the limits of figuration to the point just before it dissolves into abstraction because when you push the boundaries you understand the limits of human perception

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 [Futurism]

The Futurists wanted art to break from the Classical and Renaissance styles still dominant in Italy at the start of the Twentieth Century. For some, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space shows a figure striding into the future. Its undulating surfaces seem to transform before our eyes. About fifty years after Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution and about thirty years after Nietzsche described his "super-man," Boccioni sculpted a future-man: muscular, dynamic and driven. The face of the sculpture is abstracted into a cross, suggesting a helmet, an appropriate reference for the war-hungry Futurists. The figure doesn't appear to have arms, though wing-like forms seem to emerge the rippling back. However, these protrusions are not necessarily even a part of the figure itself, since Boccioni sculpted both the figure and its immediate environment. The air displaced by the figure's movement is rendered in forms no different than those of the actual body. See, for example, the flame-like shapes that begin at the calves and show the air swirling away from the body in motion. This idea of sculpting the environment around a figure is expressed in Boccioni's "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" (1912) and shows the influence of the sculptor Medardo Rosso, an Italian contemporary of Auguste Rodin who worked in Paris (and who was becoming more popular back in Italy in this period thanks to the efforts of sometime-Futurist Ardengo Soffici. Rosso made impressionistic plaster or bronze busts, covered in wax, of people in Paris, in which the figures merge into the space around them, as seen in his Impressions of the Boulevard: Woman with a Veil, 1893. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space has also been compared to Rodin's armless Walking Man of 1907. Can be thought of as abstract Is not tied to ancient antiquity--futurist Wanted to capture the visual essence of movement without showing an actual thing moving Wind whipped quality

Abstract Expressionism

The group of artists known as Abstract Expressionists emerged in the United States in the years following World War II. their work was characterized by non-objective imagery that appeared emotionally charged with personal meaning. The artists, however, rejected these implications of the name. They insisted their subjects were not "abstract," but rather primal images, deeply rooted in society's collective unconscious. Their paintings did not express mere emotion. They communicated universal truths about the human condition. For these reasons, another term—the New York School—offers a more accurate descriptor of the group, for although some eventually relocated, their distinctive aesthetic first found form in New York City. The rise of the New York School reflects the broader cultural context of the mid-Twentieth Century, especially the shift away from Europe as the center of intellectual and artistic innovation in the West. Much of Abstract Expressionism's significance stems from its status as the first American visual art movement to gain international acclaim. Barnet Newman, an artist associated with the movement, wrote: "We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world destroyed by a great depression and a fierce World War, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello."¹ Although distinguished by individual styles, the Abstract Expressionists shared common artistic and intellectual interests. While not expressly political, most of the artists held strong convictions based on Marxist ideas of social and economic equality The growth of Fascism in Europe had brought a wave of immigrant artists to the United States in the 1930s, which gave Americans greater access to ideas and practices of European Modernism. They sought training at the school founded by German painter Hans Hoffmann, and from Josef Albers, who left the Bauhaus in 1933 to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and later at Yale University. This European presence made clear the formal innovations of Cubism, as well as the psychological undertones and automatic painting techniques of Surrealism. Whereas Surrealism had found inspiration in the theories of Sigmund Freud, the Abstract Expressionists looked more to the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his explanations of primitive archetypes that were a part of our collective human experience. They also gravitated toward Existentialist philosophy, made popular by European intellectuals such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Given the atrocities of World War II, Existentialism appealed to the Abstract Expressionists. Sartre's position that an individual's actions might give life meaning suggested the importance of the artist's creative process. Through the artist's physical struggle with his materials, a painting itself might ultimately come to serve as a lasting mark of one's existence. Each of the artists involved with Abstract Expressionism eventually developed an individual style that can be easily recognized as evidence of his artistic practice and contribution The movement is most closely linked to painting. Most Abstract Expressionist paintings are large-scale, include non-objective imagery, lack a clear focal point, and show visible signs of the artist's working process, but these characteristics are not consistent in every example. Throughout the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism became the dominant influence on artists both in the United States and abroad. The U.S. government embraced its distinctive style as a reflection of American democracy, individualism, and cultural achievement, and actively promoted international exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism as a form of political propaganda during the years of the Cold War. However, many artists found it difficult to replicate the emotional authenticity implicit in the stylistic innovations of de Kooning and Pollock. Their work appeared studied and lacked the same vitality of the first generation pioneers. Others saw the metaphysical undertones of Abstract Expressionism at odds with a society increasingly concerned with a consumer mentality, fueled by economic success and proliferation of the mass media. Such reactions would inevitably lead to the emergence of Pop, Minimalism, and the rise of a range of new artistic developments in the mid 20th century.

Synecdoche / "pars pro toto"

a portion of a subject is used to represent an entire of object

Ready-made

relocated and reframed a known object and trying to get us to recognize it in an aesthetic way

Paul Cézanne, Mont Saint-Victoire, 1902-04 [Post-Impressionism]

Artist known for his still lifes with apples and his landscapes of a mountain in the south of france Painted over an extended period of time unlike other impressionist paintings that are done rapidly onsite Cézanne is often grouped with Gauguin and Van Gogh and Searat and called a Post-Impressionist Began his career exhibiting with the impressionists in paris but moved back to area where he grew up in the South of france later in life This painting made in the last few years of his life Feels unfinished Can clearly identify what the scene is of, but if we look too closely, the image falls apart--it is formed of a series of hash marks that create a sense of optical movement and change Not creating a realistic and believable landscape he attacks the tradition of 17th century and forward painters Creates a curtain of paint that is very apparent and makes it clear that it is 2D The whole tradition of landscape painting and even the academic tradition in France of painting generally is about high finish and not seeing brush strokes, which are so present here---Maybe not attacking the tradition but instead being true to his own personal vision as he stood in front of the landscape Depict you own subjective optical experience in front of the landscape Intimacy of vision, he has spent a lifetime observing the mountain Some sense of geometric shapes and breaking contour A subtle opening up of form Affirmation of the flatness of the canvas All the subtle cues that had built up in landscape paintings in the centuries before had been left out-----Normally we would expect to see atmospheric perspective but in this he depiniates distance with choice of color An investigation of landscape that unlike Impressionist paintings it is not about capturing the transitory effect of light and atmosphere but instead it is about something more permanent. What Cezanne is after is a tension between the deeper session that we expect and the radical confrontation with the 2 dimensionality of the surface. Cézanne would return to the motif of Mont Sainte-Victoire throughout the rest of his career, resulting in an incredibly varied series of works. They show the mountain from many different points of view and often in relationship to a constantly changing cast of other elements In this work, Cézanne divides his composition into three roughly equal horizontal sections, which extend across the three-foot wide canvas. Our viewpoint is elevated. Closest to us lies a band of foliage and houses; next, rough patches of yellow ochre, emerald, and viridian green suggest the patchwork of an expansive plain and extend the foreground's color scheme into the middle ground; and above, in contrasting blues, violets and greys, we see the "craggy mountain" surrounded by sky. The blues seen in this section also accent the rest of the work while, conversely, touches of green enliven the sky and mountain. Cézanne introduced subtle adjustments in order to avoid too simple a scheme. So the peak of the mountain is pushed just to the right of center, and the horizon line inclines gently upwards from left to right. In fact, a complicated counterpoint of diagonals can be found in each of the work's bands, in the roofs of the houses, in the lines of the mountain, and in the arrangement of the patches in the plain, which connect foreground to background and lead the eye back. Cézanne evokes a deep, panoramic scene and the atmosphere that fills and unifies this space. But it is absolutely characteristic of his art that we also remain acutely aware of the painting as a fairly rough, if deftly, worked surface. Flatness coexists with depth and we find ourselves caught between these two poles—now more aware of one, now the other. The mountainous landscape is both within our reach, yet far away.

Futurism

In the early 1900s, a group of young and rebellious Italian writers and artists emerged determined to celebrate industrialization. They were frustrated by Italy's declining status and believed that the "Machine Age" would result in an entirely new world order and even a renewed consciousness. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the ringleader of this group, called the movement Futurism. Its members sought to capture the idea of modernity, the sensations and aesthetics of speed, movement, and industrial development. Marinetti launched Futurism in 1909 with the publication of his "Futurist manifesto" on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro that set a fiery tone. In it Marinetti lashed out against cultural tradition (passatismo, in Italian) and called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and feminism. Futurism quickly grew into an international movement and its participants issued additional manifestos for nearly every type of art: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, photography, cinema—even clothing. The Futurist painters—Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla—signed their first manifesto in 1910. Futurist painting had first looked at the color and the optical experiments of the late 19th century, but in the fall of 1911, Marinetti and the Futurist painters visited the Salon d'Automne in Paris and saw Cubism in person for the first time. Cubism had an immediate impact that can be seen in Boccioni's Materia of 1912 for example. Nevertheless, the Futurists declared their work to be completely original. The Futurists were particularly excited by the works of late 19th-century scientist and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey, whose chronophotographic (time-based) studies depicted the mechanics of animal and human movement. A precursor to cinema, Marey's innovative experiments with time-lapse photography were especially influential for Balla. In his painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, the artist playfully renders the dog's (and dog walker's) feet as continuous movements through space over time. Entranced by the idea of the "dynamic," the Futurists sought to represent an object's sensations, rhythms and movements in their images, poems and manifestos. Such characteristics are beautifully expressed in Boccioni's most iconic masterpiece, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Futurism was one of the most politicized art movements of the twentieth century. It merged artistic and political agendas in order to propel change in Italy and across Europe. The Futurists would hold what they called serate futuriste, or Futurist evenings, where they would recite poems and display art, while also shouting politically charged rhetoric at the audience in the hope of inciting riot. They believed that agitation and destruction would end the status quo and allow for the regeneration of a stronger, energized Italy. These positions led the Futurists to support the coming war.. After the war, the members' intense nationalism led to an alliance with Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party. Although Futurism continued to develop new areas of focus (aeropittura, for example) and attracted new members—the so-called "second generation" of Futurist artists—the movement's strong ties to Fascism has complicated the study of this historically significant art. Futurists embrace the style of cubism but not the psychological intent Embraced speed, movement and energy Futurists were mostly italians Embraced mechanical innovations, especially with war Not war themed but still shows movement and energy Fractured surface and bold colors

Surrealism

The word surrealism has become a catch all for the bizarre, the irrational, the hallucinatory; but when it emerged in europe during the turbulent years following WW1, surrealism positioned itself not as an escape from life but as a revolutionary force within it. A movement aimed at the wholesale liberation of the individual Aesthetic as well as political Literary as well as visual Originated in Paris but become international Freed from the constraints of a singular style or medium, yet driven by a charismatic leader Surrealism was ambitious, contradictory, and complex It's roots lay in the ethos of Romanticism Inspired by eccentric 19th century artists and figures It also emerged out of the riotous spirit of Dada, a movement originating in Zurich and Berlin which sought to upend artistic traditions and disrupt the conventionality of modern life: weaponizing nonsense against the institutions that had brought about WW1 Yet the surrealists were not just after disrupting the world order through nonsense but reinventing it through experimental tactics Part 1 Automatism: an action performed unconsciously To unleash the unconscious, Surrealists did things like transcribing dreams and recording trance states under the auspices of their Bureau of Surrealist Research They insisted that our repression wasn't just psychic but social and that liberating the unconscious would have collective politically revolutionary consequences Part 2 Chance Operations They pursued chance operations in pursuit of automatism Surrendering control to the process Played "exquisite corpse" where final poem or image was the product of their collective imagination "Chance" for the Surrealists also meant long directionless walks and chance encounters with found objects Part 3 Found Objects And Collage Many found objects made their way into surrealists works Found objects could be images too Part 4 Drawing From Other Cultures Surrealism drew inspiration from non western or so called primitive cultures which for them provided an alternative set of aesthetic and social values Surrealists exhibitions often incorporated objects from other cultures alongside their own inventions. But for the surrealists these cultures weren't simply a timeless other they identified their movement as anti-colonialist and anti imperialist. Part 5 Uncanny Images The surrealist interest in the uncanny is a key ingredient in the persistence of and why we just can't forget many of these images. Something that seems bth familiar and strange at the same time...combining ordinary things in extraordinary ways, but it also meant the appearance of ghosts, masks, robots, and dolls that were doubles for the living Photography was used a lot ot do this As the threat of national socialism grew and WW2 approached, surrealists in Western europe dispersed some going into hiding or exile Though the movement largely concluded with WW2, Many of the tactics of the surrealists bled out into wider culture and began to be used toward commercial ends leaving behind much of the revolutionary consciousness transforming energy that started it. Personally I am intrigued by the idea, introduced towards the end of this video, that through Surrealism "we might be freed from the tyranny of the mundane." This is an important point because we have to understand that Surrealism emerged from the same historical context as Dada. Both are artistic responses to, or even escapes from, a society that saw the emergence of war, authoritarianism, and other agents of suppression. In other words, Surrealism is NOT just strange for the sake of being strange.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 [Realism / Impressionism]

There is a long tradition of the female nude being represented in the most erotic, sensualist way. Clothed by mythology, or clothed by sheer beauty. A tradition that goes back to ancient greeks and romans Manet is clearly drawing on those traditions but doing something drastically modern... The immediate model for Manet was Titian's Venus of Urbino, except that he's stripping away the academic technique of the representation of space, of the turn of the body. But he's also stripping away the veil of mythology By academic art we are referring to art that had the stamp of government approval There was a definition of great art and so people were not interested in new things Manet is challenging these established ideas, she is not a Venus and she looks like a real women in an apartment in Paris Her features are not idealized or perfected Not shown in a coy way unlike other historic female nude paintings, she is looking at the viewer and confronting them. One was confronted by her sexuality, the reality of a nude women is present The women was recognized as a prostitute We are seeing Olympia's servant handing her flowers that presumably had just come from one of her patrons. We must have, as the customer walked into the room and startled everyone Vulgarity here, doing more than just stripping away the mythology, it is confronting 19th century Paris with its own corruption. Prostitute is associated with lower class people but here we have a women who is of higher class prostitute Press said she looked like a cadaver, like she was dead. He outlined her in lack and hardly modeled her flesh Shadows emphasized on her hands and feet, only areas of significant modeling... typically was the abdomen or breasts. Unexpected areas. The press interpreted her hand as drawing attention to her sexuality Flatness of her body--Manet in so much of his work rejects the clear articulation of represented space and confronts the viewer with the complexity of painting on a 2d surface (seen in her 2d toes) Manet is saying that I am not going to pretend that my painting isn't paint, I am not going to present you with the perfect illusion...Insisting on unmasking that illusion and then he's insisting on unmasking the illusion of our own interests in looking at these images, he's reminding us that our interest here is a sexual one...In so many traditional representations of the nude because the figure is not looking out at us we can comfortably look at her, but here we are confronted by her gaze and by her thinking. There is a much more problematic experience here in the fact that she's a real women, she's contemporary, and the way she picks her head up and looks out at us A painting that is only partially about the nude, it is about art making and about the kinds of conventions that exist in art and making us the viewer aware of those conventions even as we look at this painting. Manet is saying let's be honest about the materials, let's be honest about the subject and our motives and desires Manet is inventing what beauty could be for the modern world Manet's complaint—"They are raining insults upon me!" to his friend Charles Baudelaire pointed to the overwhelming negative response his painting Olympia received from critics in 1865. Baudelaire (an art critic and poet) had advocated for an art that could capture the "gait, glance, and gesture" of modern life, and, although Manet's painting had perhaps done just that, its debut at the salon only served to bewilder and scandalize the Parisian public. Olympia features a nude woman reclining upon a chaise lounge, with a small black cat at her feet (image above), and a black female servant behind her brandishing a bouquet of flowers (image below). It struck viewers—who flocked to see the painting—as a great insult to the academic tradition. And of course it was. One could say that the artist had thrown down a gauntlet. The subject was modern—maybe too modern, since it failed to properly elevate the woman's nakedness to the lofty ideals of nudity found in art of antiquity —she was no goddess or mythological figure. As the art historian Eunice Lipton described it, Manet had "robbed," the art historical genre of nudes of "their mythic scaffolding..."[1] Nineteenth-century French salon painting (sometimes also called academic painting—the art advocated by the Royal Academy) was supposed to perpetually return to the classical past to retrieve and reinvent its forms and ideals, making them relevant for the present moment. In using a contemporary subject (and not Venus), Manet mocked that tradition and, moreover, dared to suggest that the classical past held no relevance for the modern industrial present. As if to underscore his rejection of the past, Manet used as his source a well-known painting in the collection of the Louvre—Venus of Urbino, a 1538 painting by the Venetian Renaissance artist Titian (image above)—and he then stripped it of meaning. To an eye trained in the classical style, Olympia was clearly no respectful homage to Titian's masterpiece; the artist offered instead an impoverished copy. In place of the seamlessly contoured voluptuous figure of Venus, set within a richly atmospheric and imaginary world, Olympia was flatly painted, poorly contoured, lacked depth, and seemed to inhabit the seamy, contemporary world of Parisian prostitution. Why, critics asked, was the figure so flat and washed out, the background so dark? Why had the artist abandoned the centuries-old practice of leading the eye towards an imagined vanishing point that would establish the fiction of a believable space for the figures to inhabit? For Manet's artistic contemporaries, however, the loose, fluid brushwork and the seeming rapidity of execution were much more than a hoax. In one stroke, the artist had dissolved classical illusionism and re-invented painting as something that spoke to its own condition of being a painted representation. It was for this reason Manet is often referred to as the father of Impressionism. The Impressionists, who formed as a group around 1871, took on the mantle of Manet's rebel status (going so far as to arrange their own exhibitions instead of submitting to the Salon juries), and they pushed his expressive brushwork to the point where everything dissolved into the shimmering movement of light and formlessness. The 20th century art critic Clement Greenberg would later declare Manet's paintings to be the first truly modernist works because of the "frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted."[2] Manet's modernity is not just a function of how he painted, but also what he painted. His paintings were pictures of modernity, of the often-marginalized figures that existed on the outskirts of bourgeois normalcy. Many viewers believed the woman at the center of Olympia to be an actual prostitute, coldly staring at them while receiving a gift of flowers from an assumed client, who hovers just out of sight (Manet here puns on the way French prostitutes often borrowed names of classical goddesses). The model for the painting was actually a salon painter in her own right, a certain Victorine Meurent, Manet had created an artistic revolution: a contemporary subject depicted in a modern manner. The painting elicited much unease and it is important to remember—in the absence of the profusion of media imagery that exists today—that painting and sculpture in nineteenth-century France served to consolidate identity on both a national and individual level. And here is where the Olympia's subversive role resides. Manet chose not to mollify anxiety about this new modern world of which Paris had become a symbol. For those anxious about class status (many had recently moved to Paris from the countryside), the naked woman in Olympia coldly stared back at the new urban bourgeoisie looking to art to solidify their own sense of identity. Aside from the reference to prostitution—itself a dangerous sign of the emerging margins in the modern city—the painting's inclusion of a black woman tapped into the French colonialist mindset while providing a stark contrast for the whiteness of Olympia. The black woman also served as a powerful emblem of "primitive" sexuality, one of many fictions that aimed to justify colonial views of non-Western societies. If Manet rejected an established approach to painting that valued the timeless and eternal, Olympia served to further embody, for his scandalized viewers, a sense of the modern world as one brimming with uncertainty and newness. Olympia occupies a pivotal moment in art history. Situated on the threshold of the shift from the classical tradition to an industrialized modernity, it is a perfect metaphor of an irretrievably disappearing past and an as yet unknowable future.

Semiotics

the study of signs and symbols

Mark Rothko, No. 210/No. 211 (Orange), 1960 [Abstract Expressionism]

Abstract expressionist artist but does not convey the kinetics that others do in their paintings We see less evidence of the process Fully abstract Does reinforce the flatness Rothko is trying to go against the kind of essential flatness that Greenberg is going for... showing us that these fields of color with hazy edged rectangles have a visible phenomenon of looking like they are floating before us Have a spiritual engagement with his painting Have a quieting effect

Robert Morris, untitled (Mirror Cube), 1965-71 [Minimalism]

Cubes as an idea instead of the cubes themselves

Cubism

Cubist painters sought to deconstruct the visible world in ways that allow for insightful explorations into the psychology of perception. For instance, how much of a cohesive whole must be portrayed for the subject to remain recognizable and identifiable? During the summer of 1908, Braque returned to Cézanne's old haunt for a second summer in a row. Previously he had painted this small port just south of Aix-en-Provence with the brilliant colors of a Fauve (Braque along with Matisse, Derain, and others defined this style from about 1904 to 1907). But now, after Cézanne's death and after having met Picasso, Braque set out on a very different tack, the invention of Cubism. Cubism is a terrible name. Except for a very brief moment, the style has nothing to do with cubes. Instead, it is an extension of the formal ideas developed by Cézanne and broader perceptual ideas that became increasingly important in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were the ideas that inspired Matisse as early as 1904 and Picasso perhaps a year or two later. We certainly saw such issues asserted in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But Picasso's great 1907 canvas is not yet Cubism. It is more accurate to say that it is the foundation upon which Cubism is constructed. If we want to really see the origin of the style, we need to look beyond Picasso to his new friend Georges Braque. The young French Fauvist, Georges Braque that had been struck by both the posthumous Cézanne retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1907 and his first sight of Picasso's radical new canvas, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Like so many people that saw it, Braque is reported to have hated it—Matisse, for example, predicted that Picasso would be found hanged behind the work, so great was his mistake. Nevertheless, Braque stated that it haunted him through the winter of 1908. Like every good Parisian, Braque fled Paris in the summer and decided to return to the part of Provence in which Cézanne had lived and worked. Braque spent the summer of 1908 shedding the colors of Fauvism and exploring the structural issues that had consumed Cézanne and now Picasso. He wrote: "It [Cézanne's impact] was more than an influence, it was an invitation. Cézanne was the first to have broken away from erudite, mechanized perspective..." Like Cézanne, Braque sought to undermine the illusion of depth by forcing the viewer to recognize the canvas not as a window but as it truly is, a vertical curtain that hangs before us. In canvases such as Houses at L'Estaque ( 1908), Braque simplifies the form of the houses (here are the so called cubes), but he nullifies the obvious recessionary overlapping with the trees that force forward even the most distant building. When Braque returned to Paris in late August, he found Picasso an eager audience. Almost immediately, Picasso began to exploit Braque's investigations. But far from being the end of their working relationship, this exchange becomes the first in a series of collaborations that lasts six years and creates an intimate creative bound between these two artists that is unique in the history of art. Between the years 1908 and 1914, Braque and Picasso worked together so closely that even experts can have difficulty telling the work of one artist from the other. Still, a pattern did emerge and it tended to be to Picasso's benefit. When a radical new idea was introduced, more than likely, it was Braque that recognized its value. But it was inevitably Picasso who realized its potential and was able to fully exploit it. By 1910, Cubism had matured into a complex system that is seemingly so esoteric that it appears to have rejected all esthetic concerns. The average museum visitor, when confronted by a 1910 or 1911 canvas by Braque or Picasso, the period known as Analytic Cubism, often looks somewhat put upon even while they may acknowledge the importance of such work. I suspect that the difficulty, is, well..., the difficulty of the work. Cubism is an analysis of vision and of its representation and it is challenging. As a society we seem to believe that all art ought to be easily understandable or at least beautiful. That's the part I find confusing. The way they taken something broken it apart and put it back together, fractured element to the work Stop and go flirtation with abstraction Splits into geometric shapes Not war mongering like futurism, easy going subject instead Flattening of the implied 3d space Jagged fractured lines that reflect light in different ways like a collage

Impressionism

The group of artists who became known as the Impressionists did something ground-breaking in addition to painting their sketchy, light-filled canvases: they established their own exhibition. This may not seem like much in an era like ours, when art galleries are everywhere in major cities, but in Paris at this time, there was one official, state-sponsored exhibition—called the Salon—and very few art galleries devoted to the work of living artists. For most of the nineteenth century then, the Salon was the only way to exhibit your work (and therefore the only way to establish your reputation and make a living as an artist). The works exhibited at the Salon were chosen by a jury—which could often be quite arbitrary. Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisleyseveral others—could not afford to wait for France to accept their work. They all had experienced rejection by the Salon jury in recent years and felt that waiting an entire year between exhibitions was too long. They needed to show their work and they wanted to sell it. The artists rented a studio that belonged to the photographer Nadar, and set a date for their first collective exhibition. They called themselves the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers and their first show opened at about the same time as the annual Salon in May 1874. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions from 1874 through 1886. The impressionists regarded Manet as their inspiration and leader in their spirit of revolution, but Manet had no desire to join their cooperative venture into independent exhibitions. Manet had set up his own pavilion during the 1867 World's Fair, but he was not interested in giving up on the Salon jury. He wanted Paris to come to him and accept him—even if he had to endure their ridicule in the process. Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Sisley had met through classes. Berthe Morisot was a friend of both Degas and Manet (she would marry Édouard Manet's brother Eugène by the end of 1874). She had been accepted to the Salon, but her work had become more experimental since then. Degas invited Morisot to join their risky effort. The first exhibition did not repay the artists monetarily but it did draw the critics, some of whom decided their art was abominable. What they saw wasn't finished in their eyes; these were mere "impressions." This was not a compliment. The paintings of Neoclassical and Romantic artists had a finished appearance. The Impressionists' completed works looked like sketches, fast and preliminary "impressions" that artists would dash off to preserve an idea of what to paint more carefully at a later date. Normally, an artist's "impressions" were not meant to be sold, but were meant to be aids for the memory—to take these ideas back to the studio for the masterpiece on canvas. The critics thought it was absurd to sell paintings that looked like slap-dash impressions and to present these paintings as finished works. Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists also challenged the Academy's category codes. The Academy deemed that only "history painting" was great painting. These young Realists and Impressionists questioned the long established hierarchy of subject matter. They believed that landscapes and genres scenes (scenes of contemporary life) were worthy and important. In their landscapes and genre scenes, the Impressionist tried to arrest a particular moment in time by pinpointing specific atmospheric conditions—light flickering on water, moving clouds, a burst of rain. Their technique tried to capture what they saw. They painted small commas of pure color one next to another. When viewer stood at a reasonable distance their eyes would see a mix of individual marks; colors that had blended optically. This method created more vibrant colors than colors mixed as physical paint on a palette. An important aspect of the Impressionist painting was the appearance of quickly shifting light on the surface of forms and the representation changing atmospheric conditions. The Impressionists wanted to create an art that was modern by capturing the rapid pace of contemporary life and the fleeting conditions of light. They painted outdoors (en plein air) to capture the appearance of the light as it flickered and faded while they worked. By the 1880s, the Impressionists accepted the name the critics gave them, though their reception in France did not improve quickly. Other artists, such as Mary Cassatt, recognized the value of the Impressionist movement and were invited to join. American and other non-French collectors purchased numerous works by the Impressionists. Today, a large share of Impressionist work remains outside French collections. Although the idea originated with Claude Monet, Degas is largely responsible for organizing the very first Impressionist exhibition. After much debate, the artists—including Degas, Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley, Boudin, and even the young Cézanne—along with many other lesser-known figures, chose to call themselves the Société Anonyme des Artistes. This group included painters, sculptors, printmakers, and others. The exhibition opened in Paris on April 15, 1874. It was held in the former studio of the photographer, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar. He was a friend of several of the artists and well-known for his portraits of the Parisian literati. Although the first Impressionist exhibition was well attended, the critics were merciless. Trained to expect the polished illusions of the Salon painters, they were shocked by the raw, unblended, ill-defined paint used by Degas, Renoir, Monet and company. The satirical magazine, Le Charivari published an account of a visit with Joseph Vincent, an accomplished and conservative painter: Upon entering the first room, Joseph Vincent received an initial shock in front of the Dancer by M. Renoir. 'What a pity,' he said to me, 'that the painter, who has a certain understanding of color, doesn't draw better; his dancer's legs are as cottony as the gauze of her skirts.'... Unfortunately, I was imprudent enough to leave him [Joseph Vincent] in front of the "Boulevard des Capucines," by [Monet]. 'Ah-ha! he sneered.... Is that brilliant enough, now!' 'There's impression, or I don't know what it means.' 'Only be so good as to tell me what those innumerable black tongue-lickings in the lower part of the picture represent?' 'Why, those are people walking along,' I replied. 'Then do I look like that when I'm walking along the Boulevard Capucines?' 'Blood and Thunder!' 'So you're making fun of me!' '...What does that painting depict?' 'Look at the Catalogue.' 'Impression Sunrise.' 'Impression-I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it...and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape!'"¹ The article was titled, "Exhibition of the Impressionists," and the term stuck. From then on, these artists were called Impressionists.

Minimalism

an art movement in sculpture and painting that began in the 1950s and emphasized extreme simplification of form and color Minimalism refers specifically to a kind of reductive abstract art that emerged during the early 1960s. At the time, some critics preferred names like "ABC," "Boring," or "Literal" Art, and even "No-Art Nihilism," which they believed best summed up the literal presentation and lack of expressive content characterizing this new aesthetic. While scholars have recently argued for a broader definition of Minimalism that would include artists in a number of disciplines, the term remains closely linked to sculpture of the period. Donald Judd's Untitled (1969) is characteristic in its use of spare geometric forms, repeated to create a unified whole that calls attention to its physical size in relationship to the viewer. Like most Minimalists, Judd used industrial materials and processes to manufacture his work, but his preference for color and shiny surfaces distinguished him among the artists who pioneered the style.What most people find disturbing about Minimalism is its lack of any apparent meaning. Like Pop Art, which emerged simultaneously, Minimalism presented ordinary subject matter in a literal way that lacked expressive features or metaphorical content; likewise, the use of commercial processes smacked of mass production and seemed to reject traditional expectations of skill and originality in art. In these ways, both movements were, in part, a response to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, which had held that painting conveys profound subjective meaning. However, whereas Pop artists depicted recognizable images from kitsch sources, the Minimalists exhibited their plywood boxes, fluorescent lights and concrete blocks directly on gallery floors, which seemed even more difficult to distinguish as "Art." Moreover, when asked to explain his black-striped paintings of 1959, Frank Stella responded, "What you see is what you see." Stella's comment implied that, not only was there no meaning, but that none was necessary to demonstrate the object's artistic value. Although Minimalist art shares similar features, the artists associated with the movement developed their aesthetic ideas from a variety of philosophical and artistic influences. Through their writings, Minimalist artists put forth distinctive positions about the work they produced. In this way, the artists, along with critics and art historians over the past 50 years, have developed a critical discourse that surrounds the art objects, but which is essential to understanding Minimalism itself. Likewise, such artists as Richard Serra, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Maya Lin and Rachel Whiteread, who use Minimalist practice of the early 1960s as a point of departure for their own creative exploration, continue to contribute to the movement's legacy and our understanding of its significance today.

Théordore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19 [Romanticism]

-In the Louvre -Massive painting -Important subject, not biblical subject -Story behind subject is grusome, taken place just 3 years earlier -Is referring to a ship called the medusa part of a small fleet of ships that were trying to reclaim Senegal from the British as a French colony -Had about 400 ppl on board, many were settlers, some soldiers. Problems began when the ship ran aground on the open ocean,where there weren't enough lifeboats. The captain ordered the ship's carpenter to construct a raft from some of the lumber of the boat to hold everyone that couldn't fit into the lifeboats. Those who ended up on the raft were lower class. -The plan was for the raft to be towed by the lifeboat, but the captain realized that the lifeboat was being slowed by the raft so the line was severed and the raft was allowed to drift off to sea -150 people were abandoned as sea. They suffered from starvation, murder and canibalism. All depicted in wrenching detail -The artist did intense research to depict the scene Naturalism and realism but the bodies are based on ancient greek and roman sculptures -Pyramid of figures is unrealistic, composition by an artist saying something, creating an anti heroic painting that is still in the visual language of the Academy -The captain had been appointed by the king and the monarchy had recently been restored. But the captain of the ship had failed... -When painting this, the artist is making an anti-monarchic anti king statement -Composition is powerful, we feel a part of it and drawn in and up. Foreshortening shown -Spectrum of emotion shown from sadness and despair to hope. All figures seeing ship across the horizon -A sense of rotting bodies and death -People are dying because of incompetence -Establishing romanticism style.-----Concerned with human emotion, fluid brushwork, energized composition, emphasis on diagonals and movement -Looking back to Rubens and interest in the power and majesty of nature -The enlightenment began in the 1700s and focused on reason, questioned political structures -The enlightenment had given people a sense that they could control their environment, that they could craft a better future for human beings, create a republic of laws, get rid of the corruption of the monarchy, yet the corruption of the king is shown here has had terrible ramifications -The revolution had undone the power of the church Romanticism is associated with this period after the failure of the Revolution and the failure of the ideals of the enlightenment -One critic said that we are all on the raft of the Medusa How is this sublime? Colors used convey pain Tries to tailor the subject to make us on edge with excitement--will they make it? Triggers an empathy, we can almost take on and feel the atmosphere of terror that these people feel Depicts this troubling event on a large scale It excites danger and possibly even a sense of eternal horror, the positive man on the right and the grieving man on the left create somewhat of an infinite loop of sublime Psychological despair of figures

Synthetic Cubism

A later phase of Cubism, in which paintings and drawings were constructed from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject, in order to engage the viewer with pictorial issues, such as figuration, realism, and abstraction.

Expressionism

Paintings where the artist uses color, line, and visible techniques to evoke powerful responses from the viewer date from the early twentieth century but expressive traditions can be found throughout art's history When capitalized as "Expressionism," however, the term refers more specifically to an artistic tendency that became popular throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. Like many categories in art history, Expressionism was not a name coined by artists themselves. It first emerged around 1910 as a way to classify art that shared common stylistic traits and seemed to emphasize emotional impact over descriptive accuracy. For this reason, artists like Edvard Munch straddle the line between Post-Impressionist developments in late 19th century painting and early 20th century Expressionism. Likewise, the Fauves in France exhibited similar characteristics in their work and are often linked to Expressionism Though many artists of the early twentieth century can accurately be called Expressionists, two groups that developed in Germany, Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), are among the best known and help to define the style. Influenced in part by the spiritual interests of Romanticism and Symbolism, these artists moved further from the idealized figures and smooth surface of 19th century academic painting for example. Instead of depicting the visible exterior of their subjects, they sought to express profound emotional experience through their art. German Expressionists, like other European artists of the time, found inspiration in so-called "primitive" sources that included African art, as well as European medieval and folk art and others untrained in Western artistic traditions. For the Expressionists, these sources offered alternatives to established conventions of European art and suggested a more authentic creative impulse. In 1905, four young artists working in Dresden and Berlin, joined together, calling themselves Die Brücke (The Bridge). Led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the group wanted to create a radical art that could speak to modern audiences, which they characterized as young, vital, and urban. Drawn from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, the name "Die Brücke" describes their desire to serve as a bridge from the present to the future. While each artist had his own personal style, Die Brücke art is characterized by bright, often arbitrary colors and a "primitive" aesthetic, inspired by both African and European medieval art. Their work often addressed modern urban themes of alienation and anxiety, and sexually charged themes in their depictions of the female nude. Their first exhibition was held in 1906 --they published a program of woodcut prints reflecting their interest in earlier traditions of German art. In the introductory broadsheet (above left), Kirchner made clear the group's revolutionary intentions. He proclaimed, "With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together all youth. As youth, we carry the future and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement against the long established older forces" This optimism was not long-lived. Internal squabbling caused the group to dissolve in 1913 just prior to the start of the First World War. Based in the German city of Munich, the group known as Der Blaue Reiter lasted only from their first exhibition in 1911 to the outbreak of WWI in 1914. Created as an alternative to Kandinsky's previous group, the more conservative Neuen Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists Association of Munich or NKVM), Die Blaue Reiter took its name from the motif of a horse and rider, often used by founding member Vasily Kandinsky. This motif appeared on the cover of the Blue Rider Almanac (left), published in 1912, and reflects Kandinsky's interest in medieval traditions and the folk art of his Russian homeland. In contrast to Die Brücke, whose subjects were physical and direct, Die Blaue Reiter artists explored the spiritual in their art, which often included symbolism and allusions to ethereal concerns. They thought these ideas could be communicated directly through formal elements of color and line, that, like music, could evoke an emotional response in the viewer. Conceived by Kandinsky and Franz Marc, the almanac included a range of content showing Der Blaue Reiter's efforts to provide a philosophical approach not just for the visual arts, but for culture more broadly. Expressionist artists also worked independently. In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele stand out for paintings that show intense, often violent feeling and for their efforts to represent deeper psychological meaning. In the aftermath of the First World War, many artists in Germany felt that the forceful emotional style of Expressionism that had been so progressive before the war but had become less appropriate

Édouard Manet, The Luncheon on the Grass, 1863 [Realism / Impressionism]

In Musee d'Orsay, Paris First title was the bath Not about a lunch or a bath Exhibited at the Salon de Refuses (Exhibition of Refused Works) in 1863 Even though it was in the exhibition of rejected artwork it still caused a storm of controversy based both on what was being portrayed but also by how it was portrayed These figures are modern Perisian figures, they are not set back in time They are wearing fashionable Perisian clothing except for the nude women The nude women is the other part of the problem...by placing a women who is nude in this context, and because she is not veiled or distanced my mythology, she is not a nymph in a classical grove, she is an actual recognizable figure--This is Manet's model, Victorine Meurent,--- and the two men are also recognizable figures... there is an immediacy here, that creates a degree of discomfort for the viewer The figures look like actual people that you would see on the streets of Paris, not idealized The other significant problem with these three figures is that no one seems to be truly interacting... the nude female figure looks directly out at us in a nonchalant and direct gaze...Typically when nude female figure looks at us it would be with a coy look. But here the female figure is returning the viewers gaze Two male figures, the figure on the right gestures towards the center figure who seems to gaze absently out of the painting and doesn't seem to return the figure on the rights gesture and conversation Odd figure in background who is spatially too large for where she should be in the middle ground All kinds of purposeful spatial problems, like the women in the background seems to be reaching down to the thumb of the man in the foreground, collapsing the last traces of the illusion of depth---also figures are rendered flatly, not 3D nude female, studio lighting not natural Overall the handling of paint is incredibly loosely brushed, not a high finish, and for paintings that were approved by the jury for the Royal Academy, having a painting that was really worked on where there was no sense left of the hand of the artist was the priority--Manet is disregarding that. The women seems naked and not nude, we have her discarded clothing in the foreground and the fact that she is wearing a ribbon, shows that she is not an allegorical figure Drawing upon the tradition of art history, he understood history of art This painting is based directly on a painting by Titian, Pastoral Concert 1509 Shows two clothed male figures and two female figures in a landscape.... And also on a painting by Raphael, The Judgement of Paris 1510-20 Showing the judgement of paris, inspired by the composition in the corner. Manet's refusal to tell a story is a refusal to do precisely what the Academy and the public wanted from the painting Gives all indications that there is a narrative, yet not including the narrative, the subject is no longer what is being enacted but rather the act of creating a work of art itself The choices that he's making as an artist, to his brushwork, to his composition He is making a challenge to the authorities that controlled art in France and making a strong declaration, "I am the one who makes these decisions for my art"

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981 (dismantled 1989) [Postmodernism]

Wanted passers-by to have a very different relationship to public sculpture. Instead of focusing on the optical experience of sculpture—looking at it from a distance—Serra wanted passers-by to experience the sculpture in a physical way. He said that the long, curving metal sheet would "encompass the people who walk on the plaza in its volume," altering their experience of the space as they moved to and from the surrounding government buildings. Serra shared this interest with many of his minimalist colleagues such as Dan Flavin and Robert Morris, who sought to engage the spaces surrounding their sculptures. Minimalist artists considered their audience as moving beings with changing perspectives, not static viewers. Serra saw public art as a way to expose and critique the surrounding public space, not to beautify it. This approach made Titled Arc a target of criticism from the moment of its installation in 1981. New York Times art critic Grace Glueck called it "an awkward, bullying piece that may conceivably be the ugliest work of outdoor art in the city."1 Employees of two government divisions that were housed on Federal Plaza collected 1,300 signatures requesting the removal of the sculpture. However, this criticism did not gain real traction until William Diamond became the GSA administrator in 1984 and took up the cause. Diamond held a public forum about Tilted Arc, in which 180 federal plaza workers, art critics, artists, curators, and other concerned parties expressed their opinions about the piece. Another New York Times critic, Michael Berenson, wrote that "Tilted Arc is confrontational. But it is also gentle, silent and private."2 Proponents of the sculpture stated that removing the sculpture at the request of a few would infringe upon Serra's First Amendment right to free speech, and therefore was un-American. Some emphasized that difficult artworks often become masterpieces only after an initial controversy (for example, Manet's Olympia). Serra and his supporters also stated that the artwork was site specific—that it was designed specifically for the Federal Plaza space. Because Tilted Arc engaged with its surroundings, it could not simply be moved to another location like other sculptures. The removal of the sculpture from Federal Plaza would destroy it. Opponents felt that the public had not been adequately consulted. They found the resulting sculpture to be yet another rusting eyesore in New York City. Some argued that the sculpture "attracted" graffiti and rats. Others contended that the sculpture compromised the security and surveillance of the plaza, making the surrounding buildings more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Many of those who defended Tilted Arc felt that Diamond and the rest of the jury had already made up their minds to remove the sculpture before the public forum began. Indeed, in spite of the fact that 122 people spoke in favor of the Tilted Arc and 58 against, the jury voted to remove the sculpture. The forum, however, brought up larger issues about the audience for public art. Who was the audience for this public sculpture? Was it the 180 concerned art critics and bureaucrats that attended the forum? The 10,000 people who worked in federal plaza? All New Yorkers? All Americans? Serra sued the GSA, claiming violations of his contract, his copyright, and his right to Free Speech. A court found that the government owned the sculpture and thus could do as it saw fit. In 1989, the sculpture was removed in pieces and put in storage indefinitely.

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919 [Dada]

A modified Readymade Comedy Bottom letters saying she has a hot ass

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965 [Conceptual Art]

Conceptual art: value, meaning and existence was rooted in its concept, rather than in the work's physical or material properties. Modernism's focus on pure form (works of art that sought to contain no references or likenesses to the external world and focused instead on their own inherent visual and material aspects) reached a peak in the 1960s with Minimalism, the movement that directly preceded conceptual art. Minimalism pushed abstraction to its limits and set out to strip art of its historical meaning For the Minimalists, art's role was no longer to render scenes of nature, spirituality, or humanity, as had been central to Western art since before the Renaissance, or even to celebrate the artist's vision and hand as had been the case with Abstract Expressionism. The credo of Minimalist art was "what you see is what you see." With these pure forms, art was emptied of all other meaning. It was as if the word "sculpture" needed quotation marks. It certainly strained credulity to imagine an industrially-fabricated object made from lacquered, galvanized iron as the equal to the historic sculptural processes such as carved marble or cast bronze produced by Donatello or Bernini. By the end of the 1960s, these Minimalist practices were being challenged. Minimalism's value remained tied directly to the physical object—a visual form that invited viewers to see it, walk around it, and enjoy its aesthetic qualities. Conceptual artists like Kosuth wanted to downplay the pleasures associated with looking at art as part of a rejection of what they saw as outdated ideas about beauty. While retaining Minimalism's critical stance toward traditional art forms, they wanted to engage with the unseen relationships that Minimalism had put aside: ideas, signification, and the construction of meaning. "Being an artist now means to question the nature of art," Kosuth wrote in his 1969 essay "Art After Philosophy." To this end, he created works that directed the viewer away from form and toward the ideas that generated them. In the case of One and Three Chairs, the central idea was to explore the nature of representation itself. We know instinctively what a "chair" is, but how is it that we actually conceive of and communicate that concept? Kosuth presents us with a photograph of a chair, an actual chair, and its linguistic or language-based description. All three of these could be interpreted as representations of the same chair (the "one" chair of the title), and yet they are not the same. They each have distinct properties: in actuality, the viewer is confronted with "three" chairs, each represented and experienced—read—in different ways. Kosuth was influenced by new theories of language and signification that had emerged in the early twentieth century, particularly semiotics—the study of the meaning of signs (words or symbols used to communicate information). Semiotics grew out of the science of linguistics, which looks at how language structures meaning. However, the field of semiotics had a broader set of goals: it sought to explore how both linguistic and image-based forms of communication shaped larger social and cultural structures. Kosuth's avoidance of the traditional media was also a critique of the ways that art institutions had historically accepted and promoted only certain types of artworks. This criticality had roots in the radical Dada practices of Marcel Duchamp and other early twentieth-century artists who pushed for the acceptance of new forms of art. Artists from the 1960s onward were increasingly interested in building on this legacy, challenging the ways that museums, academies, and other art institutions adhered to traditional, nineteenth-century notions of what art was and should be. When we look at One and Three Chairs, we are not drawn to admire its beauty, nor are we presented with a relatable story or a figure to be admired. Rather, we are invited to consider the concept of what a "chair" is, as well as the nature of visual and linguistic representation itself—fundamental questions that Plato asked more than two thousand years ago. And like the ancient Greek philosopher, Kosuth focuses on the idea of a "chair," rather than simply its physical representation. But he also reveals the importance of the viewer's role in the function of conceptual artwork. It is not until we approach pieces such as One and Three Chairs and begin to engage with them intellectually that the actual "artworks"—the concepts—emerge. In this sense, conceptual art can only exist in tandem with its audience, and is created anew each time we view it. One and Three Chairs stripped art of its outer casing and celebrated, instead, the importance of the conceptual for both the artist and the viewer. Importantly, it also stripped the artist of his or her role as a romantic and existential agent of personal expression (an aspect of art that was increasingly important from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century). The conceptual artist appears, instead, as a philosopher questioning the nature of reality and the social world in which art and audience reside Refraction of meaning into different mediums Different presences Artwork that is an idea of an artwork, not defined by its formal components The form is only a device in the service of the idea Trying to say that it is not trying to express anything...take away that Not pointless, trying to get us to understand that when we use a word that identifies a word it could cover many things simultaneously Get us to understand that words can mean a variety of different things in which that could be present, showing us the linguistic effect Think about things differently, transforms our way of thinking

Eadweard Muybridge, Baseball Batting [Early Photography]

Eadweard Muybridge is a pivotal figure in the evolution of moving image technology in that he was the first to employ photography in a comprehensive study of the dynamics of motion. Beginning in 1884 and working at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge took thousands of images of humans and animals in motion, with each subject consecutively photographed by 12 cameras. Some were college baseball players; as a result, Muybridge created split-second-long moving images of ballplayers pitching, batting, catching, throwing, and running. These images are of young males sans clothing, and who are depicted pitching, batting, catching, throwing, running and picking up a ball, and catching and dropping a ball. Muybridge made a series of still photographs of his subjects. He then laid them out in chronological order to produce what in essence were moving images, which could be studied to determine the nature of motion. In doing so, Muybridge was creating a kind of motion picture several years before the actual invention of motion picture technology. Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in 1830 in Kingston upon Thames, England. He came to the United States in the early 1850s, worked in the publishing and book-selling industries, and returned home at decade's end. While in England, he became intrigued by still photography and soon came back to the United States. He eventually settled in California and, by 1867, he was calling himself "Eadweard Muybridge" and describing himself as an "artist-photographer." In subsequent years, he took countless landscape photos; one of his most successful projects was a series, titled Scenery of the Yosemite Valley, which was published in 1868. A prime assignment for Muybridge came in 1872 when Leland Stanford, the railroad tycoon and former governor of California, hired him to photograph a horse while trotting. It was Stanford's belief that, when a horse trots, all four of his hooves are off the ground and in the air in certain moments: a hypothesis that only could be conclusively proven by capturing images that otherwise are imperceptible to the naked eye. Stanford had in fact placed a $25,000 bet that this was true, and hired Muybridge to help him win the wager. Muybridge's initial photographs — the first-ever lateral images of a trotting horse — were inconclusive, but a different set he made soon afterward convinced Stanford that his theory was correct. He became fascinated by the possibilities of serial photography, of creating groups of still images which gave the appearance of movement when placed side-by-side or in a circular fashion. With the financial support of Stanford, he began a series of experiments in which he photographed animals in motion. This project was stalled when he was arrested, tried, and acquitted for the 1874 murder of Major Harry Larkyns, who was having an affair with his wife, Flora. However, Muybridge returned to his experimentation in earnest three years later. His accomplishments included the development of a camera shutter that allowed him to photograph each image in a fraction of a second. He also lined up 12 still cameras, each with an electromagnetic shutter, to consecutively photograph trotting horses in sequence — and then repeated the experiment, only this time with twice as many cameras. The resulting images, which illustrated the horses' movements in exacting detail, were extensively printed in a range of periodicals — and brought Muybridge international acclaim. He concocted what came to be known as the zoopraxiscope: a device that may be the first-ever projector of images in motion. The zoopraxiscope projected onto a lighted screen a succession of still images that were affixed to slides, which then were placed on spinning glass disks. Each image depicted the subject in motion in split-second intervals, resulting in a repetitive moving image. Beginning in 1884 and working at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge took between 20,000 and 100,000 photographs — accounts of the exact number differ greatly — of humans and animals in motion. He enhanced his image-making methodology by employing the newly available dry plate (or gelatin) technology, which simplified the photographic process. Representative images from this landmark effort were printed in Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements) published in 1887 "under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania." Each subject was photographed by 12 cameras, and it is noted in the prospectus for Animal Locomotion that "the complete movement" of each was "accomplished in about one and a half seconds." Additionally, the images "are reproduced from the original negatives by the photo-gelatine [sic] process of printing, without any attempt having been made to improve their pictorial effect, either in outline or detail; or to conceal their imperfections." Of the 781 images in Animal Locomotion, 16 relate to baseball. Their plate numbers are 273-288. The first is labeled "Base-ball; pitching." Five are "Base-ball; batting." One is "Base-ball; batting (low ball)." One is "Base-ball; catching." Five are "Base-ball; catching and throwing." One is "Base-ball; throwing." One is: "Base-ball; running and picking up ball." The final plate is "Base-ball; error." All the models are identified only by three different numbers: 25, 26, and 30. According to the prospectus, the "greater number of [human models] engaged in walking, running, jumping, and other athletic games are students or graduates of The University of Pennsylvania — young men aged from eighteen to twenty-four — each one of whom has a well-earned record in the particular feat selected for illustration." With this in mind, the most likely "baseball models" are in fact ballplayers. Other sports are featured in the volume, with models rowing, kicking a football, tossing a spear, playing lawn tennis, performing a somersault, and swinging a different kind of bat — this one used to play cricket. Two men box, while two others fence. Other types of physical activities are featured, with models walking, climbing up and down, turning, curtsying, hopping, dancing, sitting, kneeling, or performing such simple tasks as emptying a basin of water, dropping and lifting a handkerchief, getting into and out of a hammock, making a bed, feeding a dog, and washing, wringing, and ironing clothes Physically disabled individuals are photographed. Blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, farmers, miners, and bricklayers are shown plying their trades. A wide range of animals and birds are presented in motion, from baboons and buffalo to dogs and deer to goats and gnus to hawks, vultures, cockatoos, pigeons, eagles, storks. Not surprisingly, a great number of horses — saddled and unsaddled, with and without riders — are represented. All the prominent University athletes, men and women in the various operations of every-day life, and almost every representative animal in the Zoological Garden, have been caught by the camera in every conceivable posture and active motion. But clearly, the images of athletes were the most appealing. As proof that ballplayers held the same fascination in the 1880s as they do today Animal Locomotion served to redefine the movement of living things, not to mention the manner in which this movement was recreated in paintings and sculpture.

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway, 1995 [Postmodernism]

Enormous collection of televisions and neon Grid of american states framing monitors of active television sets/oitors We see a sense of information overload and the importance of technology and media to life in this country and life around the world, and the sense of connectedness overarching the geography of where we live All of the content has to do with the state in which the monitors are present, it is mostly what the artist associated with the state Time based media, cannot outlive its own brief technological moment without conservation treatment The artwork doesn't exist unless it is being shown and performed In some sense the artwork is a living thing In 1974, artist Nam June Paik submitted a report to the Art Program of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the first organizations to support artists working with new media, including television and video. Entitled "Media Planning for the Post Industrial Society—The 21st Century is now only 26 years away," the report argued that media technologies would become increasingly prevalent in American society, and should be used to address pressing social problems, such as racial segregation, the modernization of the economy, and environmental pollution. Presciently, Paik's report forecasted the emergence of what he called a "broadband communication network"—or "electronic super highway"—comprising not only television and video, but also "audio cassettes, telex, data pooling, continental satellites, microfiches, private microwaves and eventually, fiber optics on laser frequencies."By the 1990s, Paik's concept of an information "superhighway" had become associated with a new "world wide web" of electronic communication then emerging—just as he had predicted. Paik was well-positioned to understand how media technologies were evolving: in the 1960s he was one of the very first people to use televisual technologies as an artistic medium, earning him the title of "father" of video art. Many of Paik's Fluxus works undermined accepted notions of musical composition or performance. This same irreverent spirit informed his use of television, to which he turned his attention in 1963 in his first one-man gallery show, "Exposition of Music—Electronic Television," at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany. Here, Paik became the first artist to exhibit what would later become known as "video art" by scattering television sets across the floor of a room, thereby shifting our attention from the content on the screens to the sculptural forms of the sets. This new artistic medium was well-suited to the speed of our increasingly electronic modern lives. It allowed artists to create moving images more quickly than recording on film and unlike film, video could be edited in "real-time," using devices that altered the video's electronic signals. Furthermore, because the image recorded by the video camera could be transmitted to and viewed almost instantaneously on a monitor, people could see themselves "live" on a TV screen, and even interact with their own TV image, in a process known as "feedback." In the years to come, the participatory nature of TV would be redefined by two-way cable networks, while the advent of global satellite broadcasts made TV a medium of instant global communication. As television continued to evolve from the late 1960s onward, Paik explored ways to disrupt it from both inside and outside of the institutional frameworks of galleries, museums, and emerging experimental TV labs. His major works from this period include TV Garden (1974), a sculptural installation of TV sets scattered among live plants in a museum (image above), and Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), a broadcast program that coordinated live feeds from around the world via satellite. In these and other projects, Paik's goal was to reflect upon how we interact with technology, and to imagine new ways of doing so. By the 1980s, Paik was building enormous, free-standing structures comprising dozens or even hundreds of TV screens, often organized into iconic shapes For the German Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, Paik produced a series of works about the relationship between Eastern and Western cultures, framed through the lens of Marco Polo; along with Hans Haacke, another artist representing Germany, Paik was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion. One of the works, Electronic Superhighway, was a towering bank of TVs that simultaneously screened multiple video clips from a wide variety of sources. Two years later, Paik revisited this work in Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, placing over 300 TV screens into the overall formation of a map of the United States outlined in colored neon lights. Roughly forty feet long and fifteen feet high, the work is a monumental record of the physical and also cultural contours of America: within each state, the screens display video clips that resonate with that state's unique popular mythology. For example, Iowa (where each presidential election cycle begins) plays old news footage of various candidates, while Kansas presents the Wizard of Oz. The states are firmly defined, but also linked, by the network of neon lights, which echoes the network of interstate "superhighways" that economically and culturally unified the continental U.S. in the 1950s. However, whereas the highways facilitated the transportation of people and goods from coast to coast, the neon lights suggest that what unifies us now is not so much transportation, but electronic communication. Thanks to the screens of televisions and of the home computers that became popular in the 1990s, as well as the cables of the internet (which transmit information as light), most of us can access the same information at any time and from any place. Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, which has been housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum since 2002, has therefore become an icon of America in the information age. While Paik's work is generally described as celebrating the fact that the "electronic superhighway" allows us to communicate with and understand each other across traditional boundaries, this particular work also can be read as posing some difficult questions about how that technology is impacting culture. For example, the physical scale of the work and number of simultaneous clips makes it difficult to absorb any details, resulting in what we now call "information overload," and the visual tension between the static brightness of the neons and the dynamic brightness of the screens points to a similar tension between national and local frames of reference. Thinking about how to commemorate space in a nation sense opposed to local Using video as a mean of trying to come up with a statement of this collective identity that americans have Working when televisions were different than now What is it that links all of us, the superhighway of mass media and technology, superseeds the idea of local identity. The commonality of mass media and information that brings us together Can be interpreted as pessimistic or funny

Earth Art

an art movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked

Synesthesia

describing one kind of sensation in terms of another ("a loud color", "a sweet sound")

Conceptual Art

art in which the idea presented by the artist is considered more important than the finished product, if there is one. In 1972 the De Saisset Art Museum gave the artist Tom Marioni several hundred dollars to help cover expenses for mounting an exhibition of his work at the institution. Instead of using the money to purchase art materials, Marioni bought an older model used car, a Fiat 750, which he carefully maneuvered into the museum for the opening of his show. The vehicle, parked on top of an oriental rug, formed the centerpiece for this exhibition, titled My First Car. Was this really art, or was it a scam to get the museum to pay for a car the artist wanted? After learning about the show, the University President concluded that it was more of the latter and ordered the show closed. Presumably he was put off by how My First Car profited Marioni without involving any technical skill or hard work on the part of the artist. Marioni's work was in many ways typical of the late 1960s and early 1970s art practices that came to be known as Conceptual art. Conceptual art placed emphasis upon the concept or idea, and deemphasized the actual physical manifestation of the work. Thus an artist did not need manual skill to produce his work, and in fact could get away with not making anything at all. Marioni's work was a proposal for a new kind of art that deliberately disavowed art's traditional role as a showcase for the creative genius and technical abilities of the artist. Refusing to work in any one medium, and especially hostile to the painting and sculptural traditions in Western art, Conceptual artists would broaden their approach to art-making to include just about any material: text, photography, found objects, and even the physical space of the gallery, as long as there was a conceptual dimension that emphasized a set of principles or process involved in producing a given artwork, rather than a finished product Take the artist Mel Bochner's Measurement Room, for example, a work that consisted of labeling gallery walls with numbers to indicate each wall's dimensions. In the place of attractive objects and captivating imagery, Bochner presented emotionless, mechanical text overlaid onto a pre-existing space. Art's new role, as proposed by Conceptual artists, was to convey information in the most straightforward, objective manner as possible and to engage the viewer within their immediate environment (instead of presenting a transcendent and imaginary world that accentuated the pleasures of looking). Conceptual art constituted a dramatic departure from traditional art-making, but it did not come out of nowhere. Minimalism, the movement that directly preceded Conceptual art and the style that dominated the 1960s, conceived of art not as something internally complete and detached from the everyday world (a view that had been strongly held by the Abstract Expressionists throughout the 1950s), but rather as something that related to both its site of display as well as the viewer's body. A Minimalist work like Carl Andre's 144 Aluminum Square, for example, offered a spare, industrially-produced, geometric installation that was radical because it made spectators think of the floor on which it was placed and how their bodies related to it Emerging out of Minimalism, a Conceptual work like Bochner's Measurement Room also made viewers aware of the proportions of the physical gallery space and encouraged them to compare how they measured up to the room's dimensions. Minimalism, however, always maintained a reliance on a physical object, which was, in many cases, a highly finished and aestheticized form that lent itself to being traded on the art market and shown on gallery circuit. By contrast, Conceptual works like Measurement Room and My First Car not only departed from the conventional media of painting and sculpture, but moreover, their unusual forms prevented them from being easily sold or collected. With the explosive expansion of the contemporary art market in the 1960s that included high auction prices for living artists one of the main concerns of artists in the 1960s was that art had become increasingly commodified, and yet artists weren't the ones benefiting from the growing market. At the mercy of dealers, collectors, and museum trustees, artists felt they had little control over their own work and careers. So it is not entirely surprising that artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s began to reject technical artistic skill and material objects altogether. To make an object the essence of the artwork was to be in thrall to the concerns of the market and art institutions. The 1960s and early 1970s was tumultuous and divisive era defined by the Vietnam War, passionate social liberation movements (including the Black Power, Feminist, Chicano, and Gay Liberation Movements), as well as a massive countercultural youth rebellion. The emergence of such a radical practice as Conceptual art should be understood as part of this oppositional culture that envisioned a radically new world. To the new generation of Conceptual artists, the old rules of art making and the traditional art establishments could feel just as oppressive as the institutions of the state or police felt to the youthful protester on the streets. The backdrop of immense social upheaval in the 1960s and early 1970s relates to another important aspect of Conceptual art: the sense that it was entangled with larger social and political realities. In a series of collages called House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, Martha Rosler combined graphic images of the Vietnam War from the popular news journal Life with those of upscale interiors from the home decorating magazine House Beautiful to make direct reference to the Vietnam War. In one collage, a middle-class housewife vacuums billowing drapes whose window reveals helmeted, rifle-wielding American soldiers in the trenches of war. This jarring juxtaposition not only commented on the war's insidious effects on the home front, but also signaled a sense that art should engage with and could reshape the social world. Likewise, My First Car employed a similar technique of inserting a temporal, everyday object into a sacred space of high art in order to highlight the connectedness of the art sphere to the social, physical, and economic world. Not afraid to embrace the mundanity of the everyday world, Conceptual artists polluted the museum space with commerce, contemporary images of war, and even leaking motor oil. Conceptual art had its precursors, notably early twentieth-century Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp, whose "readymades" (mass-produced objects like a urinal or bicycle wheel that he designated as artworks) also questioned the tenet that art be solely a demonstration of an artist's creative and technical abilities. In the 1950s and early 1960s, movements such as Fluxus, Happenings, Neo-Dada, and Nouveau Réalisme also employed techniques we could categorize as Conceptual art from today's vantage point. Embracing ephemeral and performative practices, and provoking viewers with sometimes aggressive assaults upon "good taste," they, too, let go of the notion of art as refined object. In the decades following, Conceptual art strategies were taken up by feminist as well as postmodern artists, and today conceptualism has become a global phenomenon, with artists from around the world. Ironically, the strategies of Conceptual art, once a challenge to orthodox, mainstream modern art, have now become so fundamental that they are taken to be a given of contemporary art practice. The Case for Conceptual Art The idea becomes the machine that makes the art The physical presence is secondary to the idea that brought it into being Described as a dematerialization Materials were almost always involved but were ephemeral Stating the existence of things in terms of time and/or place.... This is what Kosuth does in "One And Three Chairs"...Which of these three chairs does we perceive to be more chair than the other Duchamp made conceptual art ideas first... "The art consists of my action of placing this activity (investigation) in an art context" A way of working around the power structure of the art world Blended with activism Was political not in it's illustration of current events but in its commitment to rethink the status quo Almost aggressively unartful...Replaced the careful consideration of composition and form and flourish No need for an interpreter but a need for a shift in perspective Not much physicality, materials fade but ideas can last forever

Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in an Oak Forrest, 1809 [Romanticism]

--Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin --Large and one of a pair --Friedrich used landscape to represent issues of human life and of the divine --In this we see the ruins of an old abbey and a procession of figures entering this ruined abbey carrying a coffin. -We get a sense of the passage of time of the transience of human existence --Dead of winter, Sunset --Forlorn sense from the ruins themselves, old landset window gives us a sense of what the space used to be, but now what's left is just the futility of human experience and human effort --What we see is that nature is eternal but what man creates is transient --You have the monks themselves going through the ancient ritual of burial --The cemetery that surrounds them is not well tended, is haphazard and seems to be falling into disrepair --The abbey refers back to medieval tradition but that's now fallen away, older than that are the ancient oaks that perhaps speak of the Druidic traditions and the pre Christian traditions. There ancient oaks speak of a tradition as witnesses that are even older than christianity --Beyond that, the crescent moon and the sky are nature that are permanent and trans historical. We also get a sense of the cosmos --Sense of human time, natures time and then the sense of time of god's space --Optimism of painting is in the moon cresent that will regenerate, the possibility of rebirth --Winter is also a symbol of the chance of renewal --There is a sense that there will be a renewal. A suggestion of resurrection in the cycles of the moon. -----We have the crosses that are part of the cemetery. The cross that forms a part of the ruin --The Artist looks for modern language with which to express these trans-historical human feelings contemplating our role in the universe and trying to make sense of all the layers of time. In rational culture Spooky ominous feeling Trying to conjure this deep emotional response The sublime as a concept goes back to ancient antiquity but it reemerges in the period of Romanticism. Shows us the complexity and mystery of our existence The sublime is universal Everyone has the potential for a sublime experience.

Roy Lichtenstein, "Oh, Jeff...I love you, too...but...", 1964 [Pop Art]

A 1964 oil and magna on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Like many of Lichtenstein's works its title comes from the speech balloon in the painting. this painting captures "the magic" of its "anguished and yes [sic] beautiful blue eyed, blond hair, full lips" female subject while presenting "sad eyes that seem to give in to what seems to be a doomed love affair" Is among the most famous of his early romance comic derivative works from the period when he was adapting cartoons and advertisements into his style via Ben-Day dots. The work is said to depict the classic romance-comic storyline of temporary adversity In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein produced several "fantasy drama" paintings of women in love affairs with domineering men causing women to be miserable,

Pablo Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze, 1912 [Cubism]

All reduced to the point where we can still notice the objects and have representation Explore the limits of representation

Harold Rosenberg

Aligns Pollock with other American artists who infused their methods with "action," arguing that this kinetic manner of painting became both the impetus and the subject of their creations. What we see in such works is the visual record of creative activity rather than a picture.

Louis Daguerre, Paris Boulevard [Early Photography]

An early example of a "daguerreotype." Paris Boulevard is a significant step in the development of photography. depicts a seemingly empty street in Paris. The elevated viewpoint emphasizes the wide avenues, tree-lined sidewalks, and charming buildings of the French capital. However, the obvious day light of the photograph begs the question - where are all the people in this normally busy city? The answer to this question lies in the daguerreotype technique. The first photographs, such as Joseph Nicephore Niépce's famous View from the Window at Gras, took about 8 hours to expose, creating indistinct, grainy images. Daguerre was intrigued by these experiments and formed a partnership with Niépce from 1828 until the latter's death in 1833. Daguerre continued to refine the photographic method until he developed his new process. His technique consisted of exposing a copper plate coated in silver and sensitized with iodine to light in a camera, and then developed it in darkness by holding it over a pan of heated vaporizing mercury. He also developed a method of creating a permanent image by using a solution of ordinary table salt. Daguerre's technique significantly reduced exposure time and created a lasting result that would not dim with further exposure to light, but only produced a single image. It would be up to others to produce the negatives that allowed for the production of multiple copies of an image. Paris Boulevard shows the advantages of the new technique. There is far more detail than in earlier photographs. We can clearly see the panes in the windows and the sharp corners of the building in the front of the image. The objects are no longer blurry masses of light and dark, but defined and separate structures. In fact, the only thing missing are the people, except for the small figure of a man having his shoes shined at a sidewalk stand. The remaining problem of the daguerreotype, at least by modern standards, was the long exposure time, between 10 and 15 minutes. This meant that the people hurrying along those spacious sidewalks did not register on the photograph. The man having his shoes shined, possibly the first photographic image of a person, obviously stayed still long enough to register on the image. The haunting empty, yet evocative, image of Paris Boulevard shows both how far photography had come in a short time and how much farther the technology still had to advance.

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962 [Pop Art]

Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans are not really about the soup itself. Based on what you have learned about Pop art, what is the significance of these images? In what ways do they reflect the changing role of art in society at that time? Based on what I've learned about pop art, the significance of these images is that they invite us to consider the consequences of the increasing role of mass media images in our everyday lives. As in all of Warhol's early paintings, this image is a carefully crafted critique of both modern art and contemporary life. Just like Warhol's "Marylin Diptych", through the repeated exposure to an image, we become desensitized to it. In that case, by repeating the iconic Campbell's soup can, he brought the concept of consumerism to the foreground and further popularized the use of art as a reflection of society. What kind of commentary on popular culture do you think this artist is making through this work? Subject matter is not the traditional major subject but is mundane and not usually considered a work of art A way of looking at the subject as saying this is the new kind of work of art. Also making commentary on industrialization The repetition causes viewer to be overwhelmed by the amount of cans but also the sameness of the soup Campell's had the power of branding The name of the soup is iconic and recognizable Makes a commentary on the new mass production of goods and products Saying that this is the sort of demize of the traditional notice of the artist who makes single things, the artist makes things on speck instead of churning things out SIlk screens are a form of mass production, can be produced in high numbers, that idea of mass production being embraced by the artist Less pessimistic than Monroe piece But there is a sense of a loss... the individually handmade crafted goods is a thing of the past, even artist need to embrace mass production, ultimately means the removal of the artists hand the depersonalized nature of the works themselves

William-Adolphe Bougeureau, A Young Girl Seated on a Ledge (1899)

Based on what you have learned regarding the public reaction to Manet's Olympia, how do you think that same public would have reacted to these paintings? William-Adolphe Bougeureau, A Young Girl Seated on a Ledge (1899) ....Less precisely done than Olympia

Hans Hofmann, Morning Mist, 1958 [Abstract Expressionism] (see RLR 5)

Brighter colors than Pollock, geometric shapes Abstract expressionism allows us to see the end product of performance art, the work of art itself is everything that went into the painting and it the byproduct of it Greenburg likes how the lie of illusion is out the window with abstract expressionism, 2D element playing with properties of paint Reinforce Rosenberg and Greenberg Greenberg: "It was the stressing of the flatness of the support that remained most fundamental to the process by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. Flatness alone was unique and exclusive to that art. The enclosing shape of the support was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theatre; color was a norm or means shared with sculpture as well as theater. Flatness, two-dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else" Means that he takes a formalist approach Three modes of abstraction that modernist painters should embrace: Flatness of the surface Properties of the pigment Shape of the support

Josephh Kosuth, Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass -- A Description, 1965 [Conceptual Art]

Conceptual art celebrated the importance of the conceptual for both the artist and the viewer. Importantly, it also stripped the artist of his or her role as a romantic and existential agent of personal expression. The conceptual artist appears as a philosopher questioning the nature of reality and the social world in which art and audience reside. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art. The physical presence is secondary to the idea that brought it into being. This is similar to Donald Judd's, Untitled (1969). Both sculptures are minimalist and not handmade but instead have a machine made aesthetic. They both are made of simple clear surface that give off a sense of clarity and literal quality. It speaks to our factory industrial culture, not illusionistic. This is art in the way that it evokes the sheer replication of modern industrialization. It's value, meaning and existence is rooted in its concept, rather than in the work's physical or material properties. Artists working with the concept of placement of object It could be seen as a reflection on how different people can see the same thing and come away with a different idea. I linked it to the "One and Three Chairs" which showed that a chair can in and of itself be seen in multiple ways (a physical chair, a photograph, and the definition). Then I also said that it could not have a meaning at all, because not all art needs meaning, some things are just meant to be observed. Like the "Untitled" piece we studied (the one with all the blocks stacked on top of each other). Not intended to have meaning whatsoever, no explanation or interpretation

Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993 [Postmodernsim]

Concretize the memory of the house even after the house went away Way to commemorate the absence of the house, making absence tangible Attain the memory of places Descriptions of British artist Rachel Whiteread's artworks often read like riddles. She makes room you can't enter, stairs you can't climb, and doors you can't open. Her monumental sculptures appear, upon first glance, like familiar architectural forms—yet they're devoid of utility, leaving the viewer to simply look and consider the meaning embedded in plaster and concrete. Situated in East London, the artwork comprised the inside of an entire home, cast in concrete. For her project, Whiteread chose to work with a home in northeast London that was slated for demolition. The government had chosen to tear down a group of dilapidated dwellings to create more green space for the community, and the artist was able to access the last building standing—recently vacated by one Mr. Sidney Gale, who'd been evicted (he lost a years-long fight to keep his home, and the local council rehoused him nearby). Whiteread entered the condemned structure and went to work, with approval from the local council and Gale. Her resulting sculpture would be in situ, standing precisely where the original property had been. From the beginning, the artist knew House would only be temporary; the government would tear the work down after just a few months to continue the redevelopment plans. House memorialized not the façade that we're used to seeing, but the more intimate, private details of the interior. .The condemned area became a tourist destination. Some of the locals favored House, while others became angry: While they struggled to pay for their own flats, an unlivable structure had received significant attention—and funding. The art world and the local government both voiced dissent in colorful, hyperbolic terms; a council member termed it an "excrescence." The local government voted to demolish the artwork even earlier than originally agreed. It stood for just 80 days

Dada

Dada began in the years during WW1 The idea was to make an anti art to challenge what art was The world was in flames and artists wanted to show how absurd and dangerous the world had gotten One of the Dada artists was named Marcel Duchamp, created readymades. Some were assisted readymades where he took 2 objects that existed and put them together and some were pure ready mades. This was a pure ready made Duchamp has relocated and reframed a known object and trying to get us to recognize it in an aesthetic way Related the objectives of Dada Undermining the way in which we had defined art, anti art Challenging the definition of art and the art market

André Derain, Mountains at Collioure, 1905 [Fauvism]

Describe this painting as a work of Fauvism. What features of this painting align it with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists? What other features signal that this artist is striving to achieve something different from those artists? Line work, long brushstrokes, an extreme visibility like Van Gogh Purpose here is color for the sake of color Arbitrariness but to a degree The colors here generally and only generally correspond to what we would expect it to look like in real life Trying to provide a new way of seeing the world, one that is verging with abstraction There is open unpainted spots Seeing the autonomy between color and the picture

Clement Greenberg

He looks at Pollock's paintings in a more formalist way, seeing them as demonstrations of the inherent physical properties of a painting as an object. For Greenberg, Pollock achieves a painting that for the first time in the history of art fully acknowledges the basic formal characteristics of its own medium, which differentiate it from other media like sculpture.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962 [Pop Art]

He silkscreened a photograph of Marilyn Monroe fifty times. At first glance, the work—which explicitly references a form of Christian painting (see below) in its title—invites us to worship the legendary icon, whose image Warhol plucked from popular culture and immortalized as art. But as in all of Warhol's early paintings, this image is also a carefully crafted critique of both modern art and contemporary life. Reveals that he was influenced not only by pop culture, but also by art history—and especially by the art that was then popular in New York. For example, in this painting, we can identify the hallmarks of Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The monumental scale demands our attention and announces the importance of the subject matter. The seemingly careless handling of the paint—the even distribution of form and color across the entire canvas, such that the viewer's eyes wander without focusing on one spot—are each hallmarks of Abstract Expressionism, as exemplified by Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. Yet Warhol references these painters only to undermine the supposed expressiveness of their gestures: like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he admired, he uses photographic imagery, the silkscreen process and repetition to make art that is not about his interior life, but rather about the culture in which he lived. Warhol takes as the subject of his painting an impersonal image. Though he was an award-winning illustrator, instead of making his own drawing of Monroe, he appropriates an image that already exists. Furthermore, the image is not some other artist's drawing, but a photograph made for mass reproduction. The actress looks at us seductively from under heavy-lidded eyes and with parted lips; but her expression is also a bit inscrutable, and the repetition remakes her face into an eerie, inanimate mask. Warhol's use of the silkscreen technique further "flattens" the star's face. By screening broad planes of unmodulated color, the artist removes the gradual shading that creates a sense of three-dimensional volume, and suspends the actress in an abstract void. Through these choices, Warhol transforms the literal flatness of the paper-thin publicity photo into an emotional "flatness," and the actress into a kind of automaton. In this way, the painting suggests that "Marilyn Monroe," a manufactured star with a made-up name, is merely a one-dimensional (sex) symbol—perhaps not the most appropriate object of our almost religious devotion. Silkscreened repetitions flatten Monroe's identity and also complicate his own identity as the artist of this work. The silkscreen process allowed Warhol to reproduce the same image over and over again. Though there are differences from one face to the next, these appear to be the accidental byproducts of a quasi-mechanical process, rather than the product of the artist's judgment. Warhol's "cool," detached composition is the opposite of the intimate, soulful encounter with the canvas associated with Abstract Expressionism. But whereas most works that use grids are abstract, here, the grid repeats a photo of a movie star, causing the painting to resemble a photographer's contact sheet, or a series of film strips placed side-by-side. These references to mechanical forms of reproduction further prove that for Warhol, painting is no longer an elevated medium distinct from popular culture. the artist becomes a machine, just as the actress becomes a mask or a shell. Another word we could use to describe the presence of both the artist and the actress might be ghostly, and in fact, Warhol started making his series of "Marilyn" paintings only after the star had died of an apparent suicide, and eventually collected them with other disturbing paintings under the title "Death in America." Her death haunts this painting: on the left, her purple, garishly made-up face resembles an embalmed corpse, while the lighter tones of some of the faces on the right make it seem like she is disappearing before our eyes. Warhol once noted that through repeated exposure to an image, we become desensitized to it. In that case, by repeating Monroe's mask-like face, he not only drains away her life, but also ours as well, by deadening our emotional response to her death. Then again, by making her face so strange and unfamiliar, he might also be trying to re-sensitize us to her image, so that we remember she isn't just a symbol, but a person whom we might pity. From the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, he may even be forcing us to relive, and therefore work through, the traumatic shock of her death. The painting is more than a mere celebration of Monroe's iconic status. It is an invitation to consider the consequences of the increasing role of mass media images in our everyday lives. Maybe gives us a sense of the ugly underside of mass production Marylin Monroe is not known as she actually is but as a highly commercialized star of the screen. She too has been reduced to this mass produced good Look at this as a superficial representation of a person She has a fleeting ephemeral quality of fading in and out--popularity and celebrity are fickle Pessimistic look on celebrity culture Sense of worship, takes the idea of the diptych, not much of a religious dimension Bridge the divide between religious culture and secular celebrity worship here, ultimately making commentary upon the pessimistic aspects of it

Vasily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910)

If you let your eye stray over a palette of colors, you experience two things. In the first place you receive a purely physical effect, namely the eye itself is enchanted by the beauty and other qualities of color. You experience satisfaction and delight, like a gourmet savoring a delicacy. Or the eye is stimulated as the tongue is titillated by a spicy dish. But then it grows calm and cool like a finger after touching ice. These are physical sensations, limited in duration. They are superficial, too, and leave no lasting impression behind if the soul remains closed. And so we come to the second result of looking at colors: their psychological effect. They produce a correspondent spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the physical impression is of importance.... Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposely, to cause vibrations in the soul. It is evident therefore that color harmony must rest ultimately on purposive playing upon the human soul.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86 [Post-Impressionism]

In art institute of Chicago Some say they see poetry in my paintings, I see only science"-George Seurat His ambition was to bring science to the methods of impressionism The science that he was thinking about has been to some extent overturned and we were left with the poetry The science that he was referring to had to do with ways of making the painting seem more luminous and brighter...succeeded Taken earlier traditions of impressionists and he's imposing on them the science of vision and colour Interested in the idea of dividing color into separate components using the technique called optical mixture...A change from academic technique The impressionists sought after creating a sense of outdoor light, optical mixture allowed him to do this Bridge back to impressionism yet is so far away from impressionism. Not painted plein air, not done directly before the subjects although he did do small sketches Very composed painting though, wanted to bring a sense of timelessness and classicism to the art of impressionism Figures are structured within the organized space, more illusion of space than typical impressionist paintings, receding diagonal line Tension exists between this pictorial space and the heavily worked surface You can see the colors that compose the volume through layering of paint. The ambiguity of class was an issue of his moment, of his time. Classes were now being mixed He doesn't give a sense of clear narrative, not a ton of interaction Challenge for art community of the time, very different Typical impressionist subject matter makes people think of him as impressionist Allowing the artist to focus on light, color and atmosphere Technique of painting itself is not renaissance idealized exactisism to detail Instead adopts technique where details are lost and we are more focused on the overall impression of scene we see Moving in directions beyond artists like Monet into a more rigorously scientific study of the optical effects of light and color Adopts the technique of Pointillism where he has tiny pinpoints of color so when you step back the painting has a pixelated/granulated quality to it. The dotted application of paint is a part of his endeavor to explore optics. He uses a technique called Optical Mixture which is this theory in color theory that when we see colors we don't see them in their pure forms so much but instead we see them according to the interaction of colors that are mixed together or are adjacent to each other...When you zoom in you see that each color is made up of a variety of color

Claude Monet Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877 [Impressionism]

In the Musee d'Orsay A large train station in Paris--were new structures Modernity-modern subject and space French class society being mixed, train station is a place where this happens Luscious canvas Steam makes it hard to make out the architecture of the train shed Light is pouring through the opening at the top of the shed--creating this prism of color that is playing across the steam within. Trains dissolve into light and atmosphere Monet is interested in pure color and pure light in the optical play before him rather than his empirical knowledge of the solidity of an iron engine The impressionists were positioning themselves outside of the academic establishment, This painting and others were exhibited at a separate exhibition Monet doesn't give us a painting that would be a view of the Gare Saint-Lazare, But instead a subject optical experience of light and atmosphere Other people in Monet's group are interested in this subject The degree to which Monet has reduced the figures themselves to quick brushstrokes, we cannot make out faces, he reduces the human figure to these quick strokes of paint. The human figure was the centerpiece of academic painting, and yet here it becomes equal to the trains and to the architecture he's painting---And subservient to the main subject of this painting: Light and Color Other impressionists will concern themselves with the human figure, but for Monet it is the landscape and here an urban landscape that is most important to him Artists didn't need to paint classical antiquity anymore, or biblical and historical paintings. They were creating a new beauty that was true to the new modern world in which they lived. This is a heavily worked canvas, and seems to be weaving olor across the surface. No atmospheric perspective, the atmosphere is in the foreground AND the background, creating a new visual language for the modern world The Gare Saint-Lazare depicts one of the passenger platforms of the Gare Saint-Lazare, one of Paris's largest and busiest train terminals. The painting is not so much a single view of a train platform, it is rather a component in larger project of a dozen canvases which attempts to portray all facets of the Gare Saint-Lazare. The paintings all have similar themes—including the play of light filtered through the smoke of the train shed, the billowing clouds of steam, and the locomotives that dominate the site. Of these twelve linked paintings, Monet exhibited between six and eight of them at the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877, where they were among the most discussed paintings exhibited by any of the artists. shows a bright day and labors to reproduce the closely observed effects of pure sunlight. The billowing clouds of steam add to the effect, creating layers of light that fill the canvas. Here however, we must pause as The Gare Saint-Lazare, the Auteuil Line is an exception within the full group—it is one of only two paintings of the train station shown on a bright, sunny, day. In contrast, the other ten paintings (for example the one at the Harvard Art Museums, above) show dark, hazy views of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Though an exception and anomaly in terms of its interest in sunlight, The Gare Saint-Lazare, the Auteuil Line shares a great deal in common with the other paintings at least in terms of subject and view. Renders the steam with a range of blues, pinks, violets, tans, grays, whites, blacks, and yellows. He depicts not just the steam and light—which fill the canvas—but also their effect on the site—the large distant apartments, the Pont de l'Europe (a bridge that overlooked the train station), and the many locomotives—all of which peak through, and dematerialize into a thick industrial haze Perhaps the criticism is due to the fact that Monet shows the locomotives as the main subject, rather than as background elements. He shows them unapologetically, in their natural element, among the steam, workers and activity of the bustling train station. Monet shows his keen interest in light, color, and paint handling, yet The Gare Saint-Lazare, the Auteuil Line cannot be divorced from its subject—the locomotives, the steam, and the yard of the Gare Saint-Lazare. In this bright scene Monet gives us a new vision of modern life that does not shy away from its industrial side. Presents modern light in a way of trying to get us to understand how we perceive light Momentary things that compose a mosaic of light and color

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1894 [Impressionism]

In the Musee d'Orsay Monet made over 30 canvases of the Roman Cathedral over two late winters and early springs Painted it in different effects of light Monet is trying to definite this ephemeral quality of light Worked in studio across the street Wanted to capture the fleeting effects of what he saw Picked a potent thing to render, is solid in the extreme but Monet doesn't render it as solid The complexity of light and shadow on the building appealed to him Nationalistic? One gets a sense of the different effects of light throughout the day, the architecture of the building is shaped and reshaped by the way that light hits it, in a sense it is the triumph of the optical over the physical. Monet is trying to tell us that there is truth to our experiential. Monet layers paint to be thicker and thicker, very densely compacted together...a reason for this is the ever changing nature of light Not just aesthetics

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52 [Abstract Expressionism]

Is abstract expressionist but isn't fully abstract Problematized the qualities that rosenberg and greenberg talk about Different between this technique and Pollock's technique Brushwork in contact with the surface, fiction of a lie witht the brush that gives a human figure image but does maintain the essential flatness of the surface Rosenberg would say that there is a performance here Energetic expression of brushstrokes

Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890 [Post-Impressionism]

It is often said that this artist's paintings are expressive of his emotional state. What features of the painting shown could be seen as "expressive", and how? The things about Van gogh that was different from Georges Seurat and different from impressionism is that he was interested in the expressive potential of these scenes Outdoor landscape with wheat and crows flying above the field, outdoor setting like impressionism and impressionism technique as well The strokes of paint are think and apparent Sense of extraordinary intentionality to each stroke of the brush as each is so thick Deliberate manner of painting His way of painting allows us to look at them as an expressive state of mind, one of his last paintings Hard to tell what this is expressive of. It resembles his painting called, The Starry Night, in the way that he depicts the landscape using brilliantly contrasting blues and yellows. In addition it shows his belief of painting to be an exercise in deliberate stylization. This belief was inspired in part by medieval woodcuts, with their thick outlines and simplified forms---the strokes of paint that Van Gogh uses in this painting are thick in composing the landscape.

Georges Braque, Violin and Palette, 1909-10 [Cubism]

It was the inspiration of Paul Cézanne's geometrized compositions that led him to simplified faceted forms, flattened spatial planes, and muted colors Cubism style in which the objects are still recognizable in the paintings, but are fractured into multiple facets, as is the surrounding space with which they merge. The compositions are set into motion as the eye moves from one faceted plane to the next, seeking to differentiate forms and to accommodate shifting sources of light and orientation. In Violin and Palette, the segmented parts of the violin, the sheets of music, and the artist's palette are vertically arranged, heightening their correspondence to the two-dimensional surface. Ironically, Braque depicted the nail at the top of the canvas in an illusionistic manner, down to the very shadow it cast, thus emphasizing the contrast between traditional and Cubist modes of representation "When fragmented objects appeared in my painting around 1909," Braque later explained, "it was a way for me to get as close as possible to the object as painting allowed."1 If the appeal of still life was its implied tactile qualities, as Braque noted, then musical instruments held even more significance in that they are animated by one's touch. Like the rhythms and harmonies that are the life of musical instruments, dynamic spatial movement is the essence of Braque's lyrical Cubist paintings. Semiotics: the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. How far could you break down the elements of a class until it stops resembling a violin Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning "Cleveland's baseball team"). When you can use part of something to describe the whole thing They are trying to see how far you can break something down until it stops resembling the real thing, not really painting the whole violin

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881-82 [Realism / Impressionism]

Level of decor was interpreted different ways, shows class of person Everything we see is uncertain and based on perspective Bar maden, maybe also a prostitute Idea that there is a commodification of everything Monet is exposing the shifting classes in fluidity in Paris Social dynamic

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913 [Dada]

Looking at this assisted ready made by Duchamp I think he would have justified it as a work of art for the same reasoning he used to justify other works of his such as In Advance of the Broken Arm. The idea behind his work was to make anti art that challenged the definition of art and the art market. Duchamp is distancing art from the handicraft and making it a purely conceptual process. Makes the apparatus of the artist transparent, forcing grapple with how we define what art is and how it's important and maybe that our values are misplaced in a way. It is art in its ability to transform the way we see objects. He is transforming ordinary materials to be seen in a new way. Trying to get us to ask important questions.

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, Un chien andalou, 1928 [Surrealism]

Made no sense, none of the events seemed fit to tell a story. It was very confusing, almost as though I was watching someones dream taking place, which is exactly what surrealism aims to do. Most of our dreams don't make sense. I think that by doing this, the film challenges the idea of visual perception, there is no "correct" way of making a movie or piece of art. An events do not have to follow the rules of time, this resembles the meaning of Salvador Dalí's, The Persistence of Memory (1931), another Surrealist piece. Noticed the juxtaposition of unlike or unexpected things Strange mixture of things that you wouldn't expect to see together, a jarring sense of huh? Ex: eyeball being sliced, ants crawling from hands The filmmakers are deliberately messing with our expectations of narrative Irrational themes and imagery Dream-like elements Narrative structure Focusing on the irrational as a way of accessing something that is not so easily accessed Our full selves are locked deep inside of us, trying to access this irrational side of us "Paranoiac Critical method" : a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the association and interpretations of delirious phenomena...Means that engaging in the spontaneous allows for the irrational and uncontrolled unconscious to sort of come out Have a sense of randomness in this film, allowing for our rational self to be dormant Dream like, rational self is asleep, that is why they are sometimes strange

Donald Judd, untitled, 1967 [Minimalism]

Minimalist sculpture Not handmade, machine made aesthetic Each one specifically 6 inches apart, somewhat dictated Made of reflected surface Speaks to our factory industrial culture. Not making illusionistic art Clearly boxes, clarity and literal quality Evokes sheer replication of modern industrialization s characteristic in its use of spare geometric forms, repeated to create a unified whole that calls attention to its physical size in relationship to the viewer. Like most Minimalists, Judd used industrial materials and processes to manufacture his work, but his preference for color and shiny surfaces distinguished him among the artists who pioneered the style.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 [Dada]

Most notorious piece of modern art Created a new thought for that object Submitting it to the exhibition and having it be rejected is a part of the totality of the work of art Controversial object that shines a light on how it is that we determine what is and is not considered a work of art Intends for it to be controversial to stimulate dialogue Is this art? In what ways does Duchamp get us to think differently about what art is? Works of philosophy, not tangible art Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/1964, porcelain urinal, paint (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) Went to a plumbing supply house called Mott and purchased it and then made it as a work of art through the alchemy of the artist, transformed this Signed and dated it, submitted it to an exhibition, but the jury usually selected the traditional work they were associated with. They were supposed to except every work submitted but it was rejected Ready made, alchemy, art is a transformation of ordinary materials to be seen in a new way. Trying to get us to ask important questions Does art have to be made by the hand of the artist? What is art? Can art be pure philosophy and theory?

Vassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28, 1912 [Expressionism]

Not the title of something that is represented but instead it's the kind of notation that a composer uses, musical composition He does this because he is composing here with form and line. Trying to associate painting with music to suggest that like music, painting can signify, mean things, take us places without representing anything concrete He would say that you can hear color and see music, a crossing of the senses, maybe he wanted us to here this painting Influences by Arnold Schonberg, a turn of the century composer who created an atonal music This painting would sound like chaos Brilliant color, a hazy atmosphere through which that color pops, and black diagonal lines that criss cross with each other like weapons moving through space Clearly on the verge of abstraction, but not purely abstract instead abstracted from nature, an abstracted painting. We still recognize some elements of the natural world Kandinsky was concerned that if we could recognize things too clearly that our conscious minds would take over the interpretation and we would close off our emotional ability to respond to the pure color and form. In upper right we see a mountain with buildings, perhaps a church on hill, an ideal city Kandinsky was deeply influenced by biblical imagery Even though this painting is a tremendously modern painting, it is still rooted in the ancient tradition of representing christian stories Battlefield? War? Flood in lower left? Horses shown? Uses color in a radical new way for its own sake to create a sense of rhythm and musicality We are NOT supposed look at this and try to find the picture within it He is trying to work against this natural inclination, trying to break the pictorial Psychologically exploring how paintings can deceive the mind Synesthesia: see sounds of experience intermingling of senses He is exploring this crossing of the sense He writes about it explaining vision by relating it to other senses Expressionism Collaborated with the musical composer Arnold Schonberg He is working against the grain and that is why it is difficult to compromise Lines and colors are autonomous.....Scattered about in a way that defies any notion of this being a picture of something

Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise, 1872 [Impressionism]

Not the typical beautiful landscape, shows that impressionism is not about creating beautiful landscapes Monet is trying to explore the psychology of perception What role does the act of vision play in seeing this painting?...What might be the correspondence between the layering of brushwork and the idea of vision?...How is it that we as human beings comprehend visual scenes?... Monet is not focused on objects and space, not the particulars of the subject but uses those as a vehicle to explore the idea of light and color. We must train ourselves to view impressionist painting differently than normal. Only looking at the colorist impression of the scene whether it is a good subject or bad subject. Monet is trying to break it down into light and color, break things down into mosaic light quality, don't see depth but flat screen of light and color. Trying to get us to understand the way we perceive color, we look at it as individual bits of color that compose the scene, perceive individual pixels in a way

Hugo Ball reciting the sound poem "Karawane," photographed at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, 1916 [Dada]

One of the founders of the Dada Movement, originated trying to break away from any society that advocates for war Passivists Began as a kind of protest that took unique forms Hugo Ball would go to cafes in Zurich and would recite Dada poetry Poem called "Karawane"...it has no meaning and Dada has no meaning either Utterance of words and symbols that have no meaning Art is laden with meaning but Dada is meaningless...Anti art Was a protest against society as we know it Politically driven movement Spreads outside of Switzerland Marcel Duchamp brings it to the US

Gino Severini, Armored Train in Action, 1915 [Futurism]

Painted in 1915, the year Italy entered World War I, this work reflects a Futurist declaration of the same year: "War is a motor for art." Although poor health prevented Severini from enlisting in the military, he was obsessed by this first fully mechanized war. Living in Paris, he witnessed the city's bombardment, and from his studio he had an aerial view of the Denfert-Rochereau station and trains transporting soldiers, supplies, and weapons. Here, five faceless figures crouch in a militarized locomotive car, aiming their rifles in unison. Smoke from gun and cannon fire eclipse the natural landscape. Severini celebrated war, which the Futurists believed could generate a new Italian identity—one of military and cultural power.

Post-Impressionism

Post-Impressionist artists were aiming to do much of the same as Impressionism, but found other techniques to do so: It is related to impressionism but it's not the same. Variety in Post Impressionism, what they all have in common is that they all have at their core something of the techniques/intentions of impressionist artists but they tend to go in a variety of different directions from that In what ways are these paintings similar to Impressionism? In what ways are these paintings different from impressionism?

Richard Hamilton, Just what is it today that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 1955 [Pop Art]

Pop Art was invented not in America but in Britain This came about as a result of the pioneering efforts of like minded thinkers and forward-looking artists and architects, who were all excited by the novelties of modern culture, and began calling themselves the Independent Group in the early 1950s. Their ringleader was the cerebral artist Richard Hamilton, now known as the progenitor of British Pop, who made collages and paintings inspired by glossy printed ads. In 1956, Hamilton created his famous collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, which is considered a landmark in 20th Century British art because of its startling prophetic qualities. originally produced as a poster for the important This Is Tomorrow exhibition which showcased multimedia collaborations between painters, sculptors and architects, is now principally remembered for the proto-Pop installation with which Hamilton was involved. His section was designed so that entering it would feel like stepping into a funhouse. It contained several elements from popular culture, including a working jukebox playing hit records and a large inflatable model of a Guinness beer bottle. Hamilton's collage had a similarly sexy, effervescent atmosphere. To make it, he used material from illustrated magazines and other American ephemera Hamilton designed the collage as a parody of American advertising in the exploding, post-war consumer culture of the '50s. Indeed, the title was supplied by the first line of copy in an ad. The actual image of the ad, showcasing a new linoleum product for a company called Armstrong Floors, provided the main source for the setting of Hamilton's collage: a modern living room to die for, with swish designer furniture. Into this space Hamilton inserted various figures and objects, including a covetable large-screen television set. To the left, a woman (a maid?) wearing a red dress cleans a staircase using a vacuum cleaner with a surprisingly long hose - something which is drawn to our attention by a black arrow containing the words "ordinary cleaners reach only this far", as it did in the print ad that formed the basis for this part of the collage.In the main area of the room, an attractive, semi-naked couple anticipates a pleasurable evening together. The most prominent figure is the man - nude apart from a pair of tight white trunks. In his right hand, in place of a dumbbell, he holds an enormous lollipop wrapped in red cellophane with the brand name picked out in yellow: "Tootsie POP". The bodybuilder holds his lollipop so that it appears to emerge from his crotch like an oversized red phallus pointing in the direction of his desire: his naked, big-bosomed squeeze sitting on the sofa to the right, wearing nipple tassels, glitzy earrings and a lampshade on her head. With her left hand she softly caresses the underside of one breast. Because the lollipop, like a kind of magic wand, seems to bestow a name upon the entire movement, Hamilton's collage is often described as the first work of Pop Art, perhaps even its manifesto. various items representing the modern consumer economy surround them What at first appears to be the room's ceiling turns out on closer inspection to be an upside-down photograph of the Earth's curving surface, seemingly shot from outer space - a nod to the Cold War Space Race between the Soviet Union and the US, but also a reminder of just how vain and pointless the concerns of human specks on Planet Earth can seem when viewed from afar. All this materialistic, transatlantic clutter bemused Hamilton, and he offered up his preening paramours like modern-day incarnations of the protagonists in the 18th Century artist William Hogarth's satirical series Marriage à‐la‐Mode. But there is also a certain level of infatuation, since the collage articulates a wider cultural fascination with the fantasy of the perfect American lifestyle. In this sense, it represents the 'have-nots' (the Brits) gazing with a curious mixture of adoration as well as scepticism at the 'haves' (the Americans). Despite its early date, it looks like a sort of index or compendium of Pop Art's chief characteristics and motifs - featuring pin-up girls, advertisements, comic books and so on. At the time, though, in 1956, it would be several years before the phenomenon of Pop Art was recognised as a new, cohesive international movement. Somehow, Hamilton sensed the direction in which contemporary art was moving - and his brilliant collage is full of images that function like signs to point the way. Intersection between art and popular mass media culture Composed of many things pieced together...What is the modern home/family? Reduction of modern life to the extreme form of capital excess Branded items, mass produced, in theory things that everyone would have in their home Become a standardized thing, a new phenomenon that the artist is portraying Degree of pessimism here that there is no idea of individuality anymore, we have all been reduced to mass produced goods Idea of enormity and scale of mass produced goods Nothing here is made by the hand of the artist used mass produced objects to create an artistic commentary on mass production in the modern age, a little bit of amusement and warning

Alfred Sisley, View of the Canal Saint-Martin (1870) [Impressionism]

Rough Brushstrokes make it seem like Impressionism This is considered an "en plein air" painting It would be common NOT to have a sketch of the scenery before painting because the scenery and light was constantly changing The impermanence of light and color was executed through the layering of paint Deceptively complex This painting doesn't focus on the "detailed reality" instead it focuses on Sisley's perception of the scene

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1969-70 [Earth Art]

Terminal bassin dense with minerals Pinkish red water Forms spiral out of stones, creates opportunities where land and water can meet each other Meant to be a work of art that changed based on natural principles Interested in entropy, the idea of the way things break down. His intervention in this natural landscape is an expression of the way in which artists thought about the landscape for many years Smallness of man vs nature Shape is a form apparent of nature Rooted in the industrial culture, putting art into the world puts it into the hands of nature Outside of the commercial art world Like many works that were ephemeral, it exists digitally as well Looks different from the time it was created, time is supposed to change it...museums try to make this impossible Imposing geometric order into this vast natural landscape. His intervention is slowly coming apart, makes us aware of the abrevity of our own lifespan in the grandity of time

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 [Abstract Expressionism]

The Met acquired this monumental "drip" painting by Pollock in 1957, the year following the artist's unexpected death—a sign of how quickly his reinvention of painting was accepted into the canon of modern art. However revolutionary in technique, Pollock's large-scale work was rooted in the muralism of the 1930s, including the art of Thomas Hart Benton (see America Today, MMA 2012.478a-j) and David Alfaro Siqueiros, both of whom he had worked alongside. Pollock proclaimed in 1947: "I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and the mural. . . . the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural." This work's title suggests not only the month in which he painted it (October), but also an alignment with nature's constant flux. "I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them" "When I'm painting I have a general notion as to what I am about...I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident just as there is no beginning or end" Him expressing himself through technique Liberated kinetic movements Some things he can control, some he cannot Not willing to give up ownership over the end result, a random natural occurrence and a work of art..what's the difference? His role as the artist is also diminished? No still asserts authorship and control in order to declare it as a work of art. You have to maintain the artistic intentionality

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849 [Realism]

The artist's concern for the plight of the poor is evident. Here, two figures labor to break and remove stone from a road that is being built. In our age of powerful jackhammers and bulldozers, such work is reserved as punishment for chain-gangs. Non idealized figures, depicts figures who wear ripped and tattered clothing The two stone breakers in Courbet's painting are set against a low hill of the sort common in the rural French town of Ornans, the hill reaches to the top of the canvas everywhere but the upper right corner, where a tiny patch of bright blue sky appears. The effect is to isolate these laborers, and to suggest that they are physically and economically trapped. Figures seem disjointed Courbet wants to show what is "real," and so he has depicted a man that seems too old and a boy that seems still too young for such back-breaking labor. This is not meant to be heroic: it is meant to be an accurate account of the abuse and deprivation that was a common feature of mid-century French rural life. There is a close affiliation between the narrative and the formal choices made by the painter, meaning elements such as brushwork, composition, line, and color. Courbet's brushwork is rough—more so than might be expected during the mid-nineteenth century. This suggests that the way the artist painted his canvas was in part a conscious rejection of the highly polished, refined Neoclassicist style that still dominated French art in 1848. Perhaps most characteristic of Courbet's style is his refusal to focus on the parts of the image that would usually receive the most attention. Traditionally, an artist would spend the most time on the hands, faces, and foregrounds. Not Courbet. If you look carefully, you will notice that he attempts to be even-handed, attending to faces and rock equally. In these ways, The Stonebreakers seems to lack the basics of art (things like a composition that selects and organizes, aerial perspective and finish) and as a result, it feels more "real." Shows the closed loop cycle that perpetuates young to old, you stay in the same back breaking work. Allegorical cycle of life Not seeing their faces symbolizes that the figures have been robbed of their dignity Trying to get us to sympathize with the working class and invoke change

Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, 1965 [Pop Art]

The brushstroke is associated with individuality and hold the characteristics of your making and presence Emphasizes the manmade But his brushstrokes are rendered in a comic book style, mimicking the dotted look, Cheap mass produced style of images Irony of taking that style and applying it to an abstract expressionist brushstroke......He is taking the brushstroke and making it in the image of the machine made Only repeats the look of the process of making but did not engage in that process of making...Hand made. Irony of making them by hand The brushstroke is the most aggressively individual thing an artist can make His hand craft is present but he conceals it in the style Playing with the intersection of popular produced mass imagery and artistic craft Introducing a degree of whitt, different layers of meaning

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889 [Post-Impressionism]

The curving, swirling lines of hills, mountains, and sky, the brilliantly contrasting blues and yellows, the large, flame-like cypress trees, and the thickly layered brushstroke are an expression of the artist's turbulent state-of-mind. exceptional work of art, not only in terms of its quality but also within the artist's oeuvre, since in comparison to favored subjects like irises, sunflowers, or wheat fields, night landscapes are rare it is surprising that The Starry Night has become so well known. Van Gogh mentioned it briefly in his letters as a simple "study of night" or "night effect." Although Theo van Gogh felt that the painting ultimately pushed style too far at the expense of true emotive substance, the work has become iconic of individualized expression in modern landscape painting. Van Gogh had had the subject of a blue night sky dotted with yellow stars in mind for many months before he painted The Starry Night in late June or early July of 1889. It presented a few technical challenges he wished to confront—namely the use of contrasting color and the complications of painting en plein air (outdoors) at night As an artist devoted to working whenever possible from prints and illustrations or outside in front of the landscape he was depicting, the idea of painting an invented scene from imagination troubled Van Gogh. When he did paint a first example of the full night sky in Starry Night over the Rhône (1888), an image of the French city of Arles at night, the work was completed outdoors with the help of gas lamplight, but evidence suggests that his second Starry Night was created largely if not exclusively in the studio. Following the dramatic end to his short-lived collaboration with the painter Paul Gauguin in Arles in 1888 and the infamous breakdown during which he mutilated part of his own ear, Van Gogh was ultimately hospitalized at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, an asylum and clinic for the mentally ill near the village of Saint-Rémy. During his convalescence there, Van Gogh was encouraged to paint, though he rarely ventured more than a few hundred yards from the asylum's walls. Besides his private room, he was also given a small studio for painting. Since this room did not look out upon the mountains but rather had a view of the asylum's garden, it is assumed that Van Gogh composed The Starry Night using elements of a few previously completed works still stored in his studio, as well as aspects from imagination and memory. It has even been argued that the church's spire in the village is somehow more Dutch in character and must have been painted as an amalgamation of several different church spires that van Gogh had depicted years earlier while living in the Netherlands. Van Gogh also understood the painting to be an exercise in deliberate stylization, telling his brother, "These are exaggerations from the point of view of arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of ancient woodcuts" (805, c. 20 September 1889). Similar to his friends Bernard and Gauguin, van Gogh was experimenting with a style inspired in part by medieval woodcuts, with their thick outlines and simplified forms. The Starry Night evidences Van Gogh's extended observation of the night sky. After leaving Paris for more rural areas in southern France, Van Gogh was able to spend hours contemplating the stars without interference from gas or electric city street lights, which were increasingly in use by the late nineteenth century "It often seems to me that the night is even more richly colored than the day, colored with the most intense violets, blues and greens. If you look carefully, you'll see that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow. And without laboring the point, it's clear to paint a starry sky it's not nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black." (678, 14 September 1888) Arguably, it is this rich mixture of invention, remembrance, and observation combined with Van Gogh's use of simplified forms, thick impasto, and boldly contrasting colors that has made the work so compelling Inspiring and encouraging others is precisely what Van Gogh sought to achieve with his night scenes. The Starry Night, his own subsequent "night effect," became a foundational image for Expressionism as well as perhaps the most famous painting in Van Gogh's oeuvre. We are not sure, did he actually see this or imagine it? The artist is intending to be expressive Uses his imagination in art, brand new concept

Analytic Cubism

The first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in which the artists analyzed form from every possible vantage point to combine the various views into one pictorial whole. . The average museum visitor, when confronted by a 1910 or 1911 canvas by Braque or Picasso, the period known as Analytic Cubism, often looks somewhat put upon even while they may acknowledge the importance of such work. I suspect that the difficulty, is, well..., the difficulty of the work. Cubism is an analysis of vision and of its representation and it is challenging. As a society we seem to believe that all art ought to be easily understandable or at least beautiful. That's the part I find confusing.

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849 [Realism]

The painting that was his beginning Expressed what he thought painting should be 10x22 feet Large painting were supposed to be historical, heroic, allegorics, biblical But this is a genre painting, which were typically small Shows an ordinary funeral, ordinary figures, in an ordinary place When he submitted the painting too the jury, he submitted it as a history painting and he must have considered it as a history painting of our world now The subject matter promoted by the academy of fine arts asked artists to repeat the same subjects from ancient greek and roman history and mythology and religious subjects But Courbet wanted to paint his own day and time He said that: An epoch can only be reproduced by its own artists... I hold the artists of one century incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century Painting his world, a funeral of his great uncle Bringing the experience of rural life into the capital of France and trying to bring it into the elite environment for the arts. Heroicized the ordinary and common humanity It is during this period of realism that we see artists turning to figures of laborers and workers and showing them in an ennobled and heroic manner All the figures are pushed up to the foreground In the center there is a grave that opens up to our space Courbet has created a horizontal frieze (a horizontal band of figures), in contrast to a vertically oriented canvas that we might expect in a Renaissance painting where a figure would be assumed into heaven. The divine is represented by a physical crucifix. So the only sense of the Divine is actually physical. Painting divided into 3 groups: At the left is the clergy, in the center town officials, and to their right women mourning.....Each of the groups treated equally Faces of the figures and poses are not idealized Hunting dog is an emblem of the authenticity of the experience Some of the figures are mourning some distracted, no focal point, reality of life is represented Lack of interaction between the figures, each one alone with their thoughts He said that: Painting is essentially a concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not physical, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.........Show me an angel and I'll paint one Not your typical subject Trying to convey the depressing state of the figures Only hint of spirituality is the top of the crucifix

Meret Oppenheim, Object (Luncheon in Fur), 1936 [Surrealism]

The twenty-two year old Basel-born artist, Meret Oppenheim, had been in Paris for four years when, one day, she was at a café with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. Oppenheim was wearing a brass bracelet covered in fur when Picasso and Maar, who were admiring it, proclaimed, "Almost anything can be covered in fur!" As Oppenheim's tea grew cold, she jokingly asked the waiter for "more fur." Inspiration struck—Oppenheim is said to have gone straight from the café to a store where she purchased the cup, saucer, and spoon used in this piece. This amusing story belies the importance of Object and the critical acclaim and public fascination that has elevated it to the point where it has become the definitive surrealist object...ultimately to Oppenheim's dismay. Created at a moment when sculpted objects and assemblages had become prominent features of Surrealist art practice. All Surrealist objects were representative of an idea and Salvador Dalí described some of them as "objects with symbolic function." In other words, how might an otherwise typical, functional object be modified so it represents something deeply personal and poetic? How might it, in Freudian terms, resonate as a sublimation of internal desire and aspiration? Such physical manifestations of our internal psyches were indicative of a surreality, or the point in which external and internal realities united, as described by André Breton Interpretations vary wildly. The art historian Whitney Chadwick has described it as linked to the Surrealist's love of alchemical transformation by turning cool, smooth ceramic and metal into something warm and bristley, while many scholars have noted the fetishistic qualities of the fur-lined set—as the fur imbues these functional, hand-held objects with sexual connotations. In a 1936 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, it was reported that a woman fainted "right in front of the fur-bearing cup and saucer [while it was on exhibit at MoMA]. "She left no name with the attendants who revived her - only a vague feeling of apprehension."1 Such visceral reactions to Oppenheim's sculpture come closest, perhaps, to what were likely the artist's aspirations. In an interview later in life, Oppenheim described her creations as "not an illustration of an idea, but the thing itself." Unlike Read and Dalí, Oppenheim stresses the physicality of Object, reinforcing the way we can readily imagine the feeling of the fur while drinking from the cup, and using the saucer and spoon. The frisson we experience when china is unexpectedly wrapped in fur is based on our familiarity with both, and the fur requires us to extend our sensory experiences to fully appreciate the work. Object insists we imagine what sipping warm tea from this cup feels like, how the bristles would feel upon our lips. With Oppenheim's elegant creation, how we understand those visceral memories, how we create metaphors and symbols out of this act of tactile extension, is entirely open to interpretation by each individual, which is, in many ways, the whole point of Surrealism itself. Yet, the early acclaim for the fur-covered Object had a negative effect on Oppenheim's early career. When it was purchased by The Museum of Modern Art and featured in their influential 1936-37 exhibition "Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism," visitors declared it the "quintessential" Surrealist object. And that is how it has been seen ever since. But for Oppenheim, the prestige and focus on this one object proved too much, and she spent more than a decade out of the artistic limelight, destroying much of the work she produced during that period. It was only later when she re-emerged, and began publicly showing new paintings and objects with renewed vigor and confidence, that she began reclaiming some of the intent of her work.

Arnold Schönberg

Viennese founder of 12 tone music and turned back on conventional tones

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931-32 [Surrealism]

Visual brain teaser Mind trippy An attack on the rational Surrealism Dreamscape Really deep, open and lonely space and is a really quiet image Desert scape You feel as though time would stand still if you were there, unbearable sense of quiet and lack of movement Absurd environment...Naturalistic rendering of unnaturalistic things Drooping clocks, time rules us, here time responds to the environment as we respond to the environment Dali makes objects able to be several things at once Surrealism proving that the irrational was just as important Thought of it as trying to retrieve the world of the dream...the idea that the dream was a place where the irrational mind came to the fore unrestricted Different forms of reality Evidence that Dali is thinking about ideas of a philosopher named Berkson who thought about time as something that was not simply what struck on a clock, but that there was something that kind of unit of time that was more subjective and that expanded and contracted according to our experience Moment where all of those safe ideas of objectivity are being blown out of the water and we are seeing an art that is in some really interesting ways confronting that Not random for the sake of being weird, but trying to comprehend something about the mysteries and complexities of the human psyche. It is serious business, using an artistic medium to do what psychologists are doing

Gustave Courbet, After Dinner at Ornans, 1848 [Realism]

What aspects of this painting's subject AND style make it an example of "Realism"? Many aspects of this painting's subject and style make it an example of "Realism". It depicts an ordinary modern world subject matter-- not historical, heroic, allegorical, or biblical. Just like his other painting called A Burial at Ornans (1849-50), Courbet decides to depict all the figures are pushed up to the foreground in an unidealized manner. This unidealized realism is also seen in his brushwork---his refusal to focus on the parts of the image that would usually receive the most attention such as the hands, faces and foregrounds. Another similarity to A Burial at Ornans is that there is a lack of interaction between the figures, each one alone with their thoughts. Not structured casual Normal scene with normal people, not an elevated subject matter No interaction between figures Somber solemn mood Realism is trying to focus on the lives of different social classes The point of this is to have the viewer sympathize with the lower class figures Politically motivated in the sense that he is endeavoring and trying to reveal the plight of the lower classes to mobilize sympathy and provoke change Raging socialist and wants to solve disparity between the working classes Figures are arranged evenly Dark colors and contrast--exaggeratedly drab. Dull earthy tones

J.M.W. Turner, Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, ca. 1834 [Romanticism]

What features of this painting give visual representation of Edmund Burke's philosophy of the Sublime? How does it relate to other works of art studied for today's class? I learned that sublime belongs to what is vast, rugged, gloomy and negligent. Through the vastness of the fire in this painting as well that the striking and bold colors used, this painting gives a visual representation of Burke's philosophy of sublime by causing feelings of terror and horror among its viewers. It resembles the work by the same artist called ,"Snow Storm". Both paintings capture the power and vastness of nature in order to create feelings of unease and terror among the audience. Scary and ominous colors Sublime is the emotional reaction we have to paintings, A way of portraying events that gets us to have an emotional reaction to it People watching the fire, what is sublime is the relief that it did not happen to you A twisted perversion that we have where we are oddly excited by things that are terrible and horrifying when they aren't happening to you--the idea that something terrifying can somewhat trigger a morbid excitement. Distance is crucial to the sublime, If you are too close to whatever terrifying thing we are witnessing that is not the sublime, like when you see a car crash from a far, a growing horror, an uneasy feeling, makes you feel a morbid curiosity,

Pop Art

art based on modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values. The years following World War II saw enormous growth in the American economy, which, combined with innovations in technology and the media, spawned a consumer culture with more leisure time and expendable income than ever before. The manufacturing industry that had expanded during the war now began to mass-produce everything Significantly, the development of television, as well as changes in print advertising, placed new emphasis on graphic images and recognizable brand logos—something that we now take for granted in our visually saturated world. It was in this artistic and cultural context that Pop artists developed their distinctive style of the early 1960s. Characterized by clearly rendered images of popular subject matter, it seemed to assault the standards of modern painting, which had embraced abstraction as a reflection of universal truths and individual expression. In contrast to the dripping paint and slashing brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism—and even of Proto-Pop art—Pop artists applied their paint to imitate the look of industrial printing techniques. As the decade progressed, artists shifted away from painting towards the use of industrial techniques

Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life, 1905-06 [Fauvism]

considered his greatest Fauve painting, It is a large-scale painting depicting an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. The references are many, but in form and date, Bonheur de Vivre is closest to Cézanne's last great image of bathers. the Fauves adopted a painterly approach to enhance their work's emotional power, not to capture fleeting effects of color, light or atmosphere on their subjects. Their preference for landscapes, carefree figures and lighthearted subject matter reflects their desire to create an art that would appeal primarily to the viewers' senses. . Bright colors and undulating lines pull our eye gently through the idyllic scene, encouraging us to imagine feeling the warmth of the sun, the cool of the grass, the soft touch of a caress, and the passion of a kiss. Expressiveness shown In what ways is this work expressive? What elements? Matisse is recognizing that there is a shared notion of expressive emotion associated with color Recognizing the emotional attachment to certain kinds of lines, a carefree sentiment associated with the curvilinear lines Elements merging with autonomy Autonomy meaning a nation calling their own shots The elements in this work are not put in place for the sole purpose of representing the world in a real and naturalistic way......The curvilinear lines are so emphasized that they are almost as a separate element from the figures. Exploring how color and line can be expressive and don't have to congeal to the picture

Guy C. Wiggins, Winter, New York [Impressionism]

tried to arrest a particular moment in time by pinpointing specific atmospheric conditions—light flickering on water, moving clouds, a burst of rain. Their technique tried to capture what they saw. They painted small commas of pure color one next to another This work exemplifies these qualities as the artist appears to have wanted to focus on the capturing a particular moment in time through the use of paint and color to render the appearance of quickly shifting light on the surface of forms and changing atmospheric conditions. Seeing the people in the streets helps capture the rapid pace of contemporary life. The fact that the subject is outdoors resembles other impressionist works as it was done purposefully in order to capture the appearance of the light as it flickered and faded while they worked. resembles Monet's, The Gare Saint-Lazare (1877). This is because of the degree to which both Monet and Wiggens have reduced the figures int he scene to quick brushstrokes. The human figure was the centerpiece of academic painting, and yet here it becomes equal to the the architecture of the scene--And subservient to the main subject of this painting: Light and Color. Wiggens alike many other impressionists was creating a new beauty that was true to the new modern world in which they lived. No permanent reality We perceive things from momentary views of light and color Impressionism is about exploring the nature of perception Way more than just the superficial Trying to interrogate how we understand and comprehend the visible world around us