Art History Final Exam
Impasto
A layer of thickly applied pigment.
Symbolist
-A late-19th-century movement based on the idea that the artist was not an imitator of nature but a creator who transformed the facts of nature into a symbol of the inner experience of that fact. -Symbolism: "Show me an angel, and I'll paint you an angel." ~Courbet
Pointillism
-A system of painting devised by 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat. The artist separates color into its component parts and then applies the component colors to the canvas in tiny dots. The image becomes comprehensible only from a distance, when the viewer's eyes optically blend the pigment dots. Sometimes referred to as divisionism.
Reconstruction
-After the civil war, the Reconstruction is the healing of the United States. -Many veterans take back to society in search for work and a happy life absent of war.
Plein aire
-An approach to painting popular among the Impressionists, in which an artist sketches outdoors to achieve a quick impression of light, air, and color. The artist then takes the sketches to the studio for reworking into more finished works of art. -Hanging out in the open.
Academic art
-Art done within the academic world. -Example would be "Nymphs and Satyrs".
Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911
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Gertrude and Leon Stein
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Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905
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Matisse, Red Room, 1908-1909
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No Cubism on the test.
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Winslow Homer, the Veteran in the Field, 1865
Realism wasn't exclusive to France and Europe. Winslow Homer, one of the leading American Realist painters of Boston. -Artist-reporter for the Union during Civil war. -Relatively simple and direct, Homer's painting is a significant commentary on the effects/aftermath of America's catastrophic national conflict. -Veteran's involvement on productive work as a farmer implies a smooth transition from war to peace, considered evidence of America's strength. -Homer rejected realism in favor of symbolism. -Veteran wielding scythe transforms him into the symbol of death-turning the painting into an elegy to the thousands of soldiers who did not return from the war. -American realist.
Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Nymphs and Satyr, 1873
-Academic art.
Carte de visit
-Similar to early postcards.
Pavillion of Realism
-Courbet's reaction when his paintings were rejected by 1855 jury from French salon. -Manet also creates his own exhibition.
Charles Baudelaire
-His idea is that beauty is ephemeral, constantly fleeting in the opposite direction. -Wrote an essay.
Edgar Degas, Ballet Rehearsal, 1874,
-Impressionists also depicted more formal leisure activities. -The fascination Edgar Degas had with patterns of motion brought him to the Paris Opera and its ballet school. -His keen observational power took in the formalized movements of classical ballet, one of his favorite subjects. -Degas used (to be continued.)
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893.
-Munch felt deeply the pain of human life and believed humans were powerless before the great natural forces of death and love. -The emotions associated with them-jealousy, loneliness, fear, desire, despair-became the theme of most of his art. -Realist and Impressionist techniques were inappropriate focusing as they did on the tangible world; in the spirit of Symbolism, Munch used color, line, and figural distortion to expressive ends. -The Scream exemplifies Munch's style, it departs from visual reality. -The landscapes curvilinear lines coincide with the mans bulbous head, an echo. -The fiery red and yellow stripes give the sky an eerie glow. --Munch left a descriptive epigraph describing the context of the scenario and it was highly appropriate considering the painting's subject manner.
Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886
-Seurat's successful creation of pointillism owes to 19th-century contributions to theories about color and how people perceive it. -Influences on Seurat's pointillism include chemist Chevreul, Blanc, and physicist Rood. -Subject of painting is consistent with Impressionist recreational themes, but Seurat's rendition of Parisians at leisure is strangely rigid and distant, unlike the spontaneity of Impressionism. -He played on repeated motifs to create both flat patterns and spatial depth. -Sunshine fills the picture but the painter did not break the light into transient patches of color. -Light, air, people, and landscape are formal elements in an abstract design in which line, color, value and shape cohere in a precise and tightly controlled organization. -Doesn't like the subjective nature of Impressionism; Seurat thinks there should be methodology.
Image d'epinal
-Style Courbet would use on wood. -Commonly circulated works circulated by working class people, commonly using wooden blocks.
Cezanne, The Basket of Apples, 1895
-We look at the apples from in front and above. -Giving us a view from different points of perspective. -Cezanne was very analytical in preparing, observing and painting that he had to abandon using real apples because they rot. -Cezanne's methods never allow to viewer to disregard the two dimensionality of the image. -Cezanne achieved a remarkable feat-presenting the viewer with two dimensional and three-dimensional images simultaneously. -Cezanne creates a perspective where the viewer is approaching the apples with intent.
Vincent van Gogh, The Night Café, 1888
-van Gogh valued the power to create and that involved the expressive use of color. -In this painting, van Gogh tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. -Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empty dreary room, in violet and blue. -In Night Cafe, van Gogh explored ways colors and distorted forms can express emotions. The thickness, shape and direction of his brushstrokes create a tactile counterpart to the intense colors.
Daguerreotype
A photograph made by an early method on a plate of chemically treated metal; developed by Louis J.M. Daguerre.
Fin de siecle
French, "end of the century." A period in Western cultural history from the end of the 19th century until just before WWI, when decadence and indulgence masked anxiety about an uncertain future.
Impressionism
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists. Their independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s, in spite of harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. -Impressionist painters built upon the innovations of the Realists in turning away from traditional mythological and religious themes in favor of daily life, but they sought to convey the elusiveness and impermanence of the subjects they portrayed.
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849
Straightforward- 2 men, one young and one old, approximate age 70, in the act of breaking stones, traditionally a job for the lowest members of French society. By juxtaposing youth and age, Courbet makes a statement of poverty, suggesting those born to poverty remain poor their entire lives. Courbet neither romanticized or idealized the men, he painted with directness and accuracy. Courbet's palette of dirty browns and grays further conveys the dreary and dismal nature of the task and the angular positioning of the older stone breaker's limbs suggest a mechanical monotony. Courbet's portrayal of the working poor had resonance with his mid-19th century audience. In 1848, labourers rebelled against the bourgeois leaders of the newly formed Second Republic and against the rest of the nation, demanding better working conditions and redistribution of property. The army quelled the uprising in three days but caused long lasting trauma. His depiction raised the issue of labor and was both timely and populist. -Got destroyed. -It was pretty damn big; people considered it hideously ugly.
Claude Monet, Impressionism: Sunrise, 1872,
-A hostile critic applied the derogatory term Impressionism to this painting because of its sketchy quality and undisguised brushstrokes. Monet and his circle embraced the label for their movement. -Impressionist Monet didn't bother to disguise his brushstrokes or blend his pigment to create smooth tonal gradiations and an optically accurate scene. -Impressionism often relates to sketches, abbreviation, speed and spontaneity. -Impressionism operated at the intersection of what the artists saw and what they felt. -Neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective, a balance of the two, they were sensations-the artists' subjective and personal response to nature. -In contrast to traditional studio artists, Monet worked outdoors. -Painting en plein air sharpened Monet's focus on the roles light and color play. -Using various colors and short, choppy brushstrokes, Monet was able to catch accurately the virating quality of light. -The fact that Impressionist works are unintelligible in close range and requires the viewers to step back a distance to fuse the strokes together accounts for much of the early criticism aimed at Monet and his fellow Impressionists. -created the societe anonyme however he shows at the salon floating studio conjures ones experience sense of movement vagueness modern industries
Manet, Olympia, 1863
-Another scandalous work of Manet's was Olympia. -Depicts a young white prostitute reclining on a bed, completely nude except for the bracelet, ribbon, flower, and shoes. -Olympia meets the viewers eyes with a look of cool indifference. -The only other figure in the painting is a black maid who presents Olympia with flowers sent from a, presumably, satisfied client. -Olympia horrified the public and critics alike, although prostitutes were not unheard of, the shamelessness of Olympia shocked viewers. -The depiction of a black woman was also not new, but Manet's inclusion of a black maid and a nude prostitute evoked moral depravity, inferiority, and animalistic sexuality. -The contrast of the black servant and the nude prostitute also conjured racial divisions. -One critic described Olympia as "a courtesan with dirty hands and wrinkled feet....her body has the livid tint of a cadaver displayed in the morgue; her outlines are drawn in charcoal and her greenish, bloodshot eyes appear to be provoking the public, protected all the while by a hideous Negress." -From this view, it is clear that critics weren't only judging Manet's subject matter but also his artistic style; the painter's brushstrokes are rougher and the shifts in tonality more abrupt that those found in traditional painting. -This departure from accepted practice exacerbated the audacity of the subject matter.
Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon, 1888
-As van Gogh did, Gauguin rejected objective representation in favor of subjective expression. -He also broke with the Impressionists' studies of minutely contrasted hues because he believed color above all must be expressive. -For Gauguin, the artists power to choose colors in a painting was a central element of creativity. -Gauguin's color areas appear flatter, often visually dissolving into abstract patches or patterns. -In this work, Gauguin decisively rejected both Realism and Impressionism. -The painting shows Breton women, wearing their starched white Sunday caps and black dresses, visualizing the sermon they have just heard at church on Jacob's encounter with the holy spirit. -The women pray devoutly before the apparition. -Gauguin departed from optical realism and composed the picture elements to focus the viewer's attention on the idea and intensify its message. -Gauguin didn't unify the picture with a horizon perspective, light or shade. -Instead, he abstracted the scene into a pattern. -The caps, sharp profiles and hard contours suggest the austerity of peasant life and ritual. -Gauguin admired Japanese prints, stained glass and cloisonne metalwork. -These art forms contributed to his own daring experiment to transform traditional painting and Impressionism into abstract, expressive patterns of line, shape, and pure color. -Gauguin is deeply interested in religion. -Flees from modernity.
Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-1904
-Doesn't want an apparent foreground, middle ground, background but instead provides depth with the placement of trees. -Cezanne's aim wasn't to capture the photographic truth of the image nor the truth of impressionism. -Cezanne, like Seurat developed a more analytical style. -His goal was to order the lines, planes and colors comprising nature. -He wished to achieve Poussin's effects of distance, depth, structure and solidity not by using traditional perspective and chiaroscuro but by recording the color patterns he deduced from an optical analysis of nature. -With special care, Cezanne studied and explored the properties of line, plane, and color and their interrelationships. -To create the illusion of three-dimensional form and space, Cezanne focused on carefully selecting colors: cool colors recede; warm colors advance.
Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875
-Eakins brutal realism prompted the art jury to reject it for the Philadelphia exhibition celebrating the American independence centennial 1876. -Portrays renowned surgeon Samuel Gross in the operating amphitheater of the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. -Gross, with bloody fingers and scalpel, lectures as surgery is conducted on a young man's leg. -The painting is an unsparing description of an unfolding event, with a good deal more reality than many viewers could endure. -American realist. -Shows a professor at a medical school. -He is shown in the back as the artist. -Anesthesiologist is a newly found profession.
Edouard Manet, Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863
-Edouard Manet was a pivotal figure in 19th-century European art. -This painting is widely recognized as a seminal work of art. -Depicts two clothed men and one nude and one clothed woman at a picnic. -Consistent with Realist principles, Manet based the four figures on real people. -The seated nude is Manet's favorite model at the time and the gentleman with the cane is his brother and the sculptor Ferdinand Leenhof. -The two men wear fashionable Persian attire of the 1860s. -The nude women is unidealized who also unbashed and uneasingly gazes directly at the viewer without shame or flirtatiousness. -The audacious painting outraged the French public, rather than a traditional pastoral scene, Manet features ordinary men and promiscuous women in a Parisian park. -Manet did not expect to shock the public but anticipated criticism. -His sough to reassess the nature of painting by incorporating references and allusions to many painting genres: history painting, portraiture, pastoral scenes, nudes, and even religious scenes. -This is Manet's synthesis and critique of the history of painting. -Manet focused on flatness, as he recognizable does not utilize paint and light to create form, rendering a majority of his painting flat. -Foreground is harshly lit, creating strong contrast with the dark surroundings; in the main figure, many values are summed up in one or two lights or darks.
Mary Cassatt, The Bath, 1892
-Exhibited regularly with Impressionists but as a woman, she could not easily frequent the cafes with her male artist friends. -She also had the responsibility of caring for her aging parents, who had joined her to Paris. -Because of these restrictions, Cassatt's subjects were mainly women and children, whom she presented with a combination of objectivity and genuine sentiment. -Shows the tender relationship between mother and child. -The visual solidity of the mother and child contrasts with the flattened patterning of the wallpaper and rug. -Cassatt's style owed much to the compositional devices of Degas and of Japanese prints, but the painting's design has an originality and strength all of its own. -
Salon de refuses
-Growing dissatisfaction with the decisions of the French Academy's jurors prompted Napoleon III in 1863 to establish this salon (Salon of the Rejected) to show all of the works not accepted for exhibition in the regular salon. -Impressionists formed their own society and began mounting shows of their works in Paris; this action allowed the Impressionists much freedom,for they did not have to contend with the Royal Academy's authoritative and confining viewpoint.
Auguste Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
-Modern industrialized Paris provided ample time for more leisure activities, and scenes of dining, dancing, cafe-concerts, opera and ballet became main-stays of Impressionism. -Depicts a popular Parisian dance hall, some people crowd the tables and chatter, while others dance energetically. -The atmosphere is so lively, the viewer can virtually hear the sounds of music, laughter, and tinkling glasses. -The painter dappled the whole scene with sunlight and shade, artfully blurred into the figures to produce precisely the effect of floating and fleeting light the Impressionists cultivated. -Renoir's casual unposed placement of the figures and the suggested continuity of space, spreading in all directions and only accidentally limited by the frame, positions the viewer as a participant rather than an outsider. -Whereas classical artists sought to express universal and timeless qualities, the Impressionists attempted to depict just the opposite-the incidental and momentary.
Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre, Still life in Studio, 1837
-One of the first plates Daguerre produced after perfecting his new photographic process was this still life, in which he was able to capture amazing detail and finely graduated tones of light and shadow. -Daguerre was an architect and theatrical set painter and designer who used camera obscura in his work. -Daguerre continued Niepce's work and made discoveries shortening exposure time and improving exposure clarity, formalizing the daguerreotype.
Timothy O'Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863
-Photographers were quick to realize the power of their medium, historical events could be captured on the spot for the first time. -Photographs of the Civil War taken by Brady and Sullivan remain unsurpassed as incisive accounts of military life, unsparing in truthful detail and poignant as expressions of human experience. -Reminds viewers of the high price of war, bodies litter the battlefield as far as the eye can see. -Pockets and boots are picked, showing the harsh reality of war. -The suggestion of innumerable other dead soldiers is unavoidable. -Made a lasting impression.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1892-1895
-With Impressionists regularly capturing the sensibility of modern life, Toulouse added a satirical edge to it. -Genetic defects stunted his growth and partially crippled him, leading to his self-exile from the high society his ancient aristocratic name allowed him to enter. -He became a denizen of the night world of Paris, consorting with a tawdry population of entertainers, prostitutes and other social outcasts. -This painting reveals the influence of Degas, of Japanese prints, and of photography in the oblique and asymmetrical composition, the spatial diagonals and the strong line patterns with added dissonant colors. -Emphasized or exaggerated each element so that the tone is new. -Nightlife scene is reflected by artificial light, brassy music and an assortment of corrupt, cruel mask-like faces. -He included himself in it, the small man accompanying the tall man. -Such distortions by simplifications of the figures and faces anticipated Expressionism, when artists' use of formal elements-for example, brighter colors and bolder lines than ever before-increased the effect of their images on observers.
Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912
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Tuesday, December 9th 10:15/ Bring scantron 886-e
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Gustave Caillebotte, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877
Caillebotte's interest in photography is evident from the painting. The figures in the foreground appear slightly "out of focus", those in the mid-distance (the carriage and the pedestrians in the middle of the intersection) have sharp edges, while the features in the background becomes progressively indistinct. The severe cropping of some figures - particularly the man to the far right - further suggests the influence. The point-focus of the image highlights the dimensions and draws the viewer's eye to the vantage point at the centre of the buildings in the background. The figures appear to have walked into the painting, as though Caillebotte was taking a snapshot of people casually going about their day, hiding the fact that he spent months carefully placing his figures within the pictorial space. The strong vertical of the central green lamppost divides the painting in half, with another strong horizontal alignment breaking the painting into four quarters. The two principal figures in the right foreground are a fashionable man and woman walking together under an umbrella: he with top hat, moustache, bow tie, starched white shirt, buttoned waistcoat and open long coat with collar turned up; she with her hat, veil, diamond earring and demure brown dress. The main figures are from the well-dressed middle class, but some working class figures can be seen in the background (a maid in a doorway, a painter carrying a ladder). Caillebotte juxtaposes the figures and the perspective in a playful manner, with one man appearing to jump from the wheel of a carriage and another pair of legs appearing below the rim of an umbrella.
Japonisme
-Inspired by Japanese art/prints.
Cafe concert
-Middle class enjoyed leisure activities such as going out, dining, etc. etc.
Paul Cezanne
-moves away from the privileging of subject matter. Cezanne wants to conceptualize the world and to represent the world that is mentally conceivable rather than the world which is only seen. -Considered the father of modern art.
Pallete Knife
A flat tool use to scrape paint off a palette. Artists sometimes also use the palette knife in place of a brush to apply paint directly to the canvas.
Synthetic cubism
A later phase of cubism, win 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.
Modernism
A movement in Western art that developed in the second half of the 19th-century and sought to capture the images and sensibilities of the age. Modernist art goes beyond simply dealing with the present and involves the artist's critical examination of the premises of art itself.
Jean Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857
As did Courbet, Jean-Francois Millet found his subjects in the people and occupations of everyday world. Millet lived in the country to be close to his rural subjects, settling near the village of Barbizon. In this painting, Millet depicted three impoverished women-members of the lowest level of peasant society-performing the backbreaking task of gleaning-collecting the scraps after harvest. Millet characteristically placed his monumental figures in the foreground against a broad sky. The gleaners dominate the canvas. In the aftermath of 1848 uprising, Millet's painting did not meet meet approval with the moor prosperous classes. With socialism, economic equality and social justice on the rise, much of the public saw Millet's portrayal a political manifesto.
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.
Papier colle
Papier collé (French: pasted paper or paper cut outs) is a type of collage and collaging technique in which paper is adhered to a flat mount. The difference between collage and papier collé is that the latter refers exclusively to the use of paper, while the former may incorporate other two-dimension (non-paper) components. As the term papier collé is not commonly used, this type of work is often simply called collage. Cubist painter Georges Braque, inspired by Pablo Picasso's collage method, invented the technique and first used it in his 1912 work, Fruit Dish and Glass. Braque continued to use the technique in works such as Bottle, Newspaper, Pipe, and Glass. Other notable artists who pioneered this technique include Kurt Schwitters, Henri Matisse, and Robert Motherwell. Papier collé is sometimes also used to refer specifically to the paper collages of the Cubists.
Positivism
The belief that scientific laws governed the environment and human activity and could be revealed through careful recording and analysis of observable data. Positivists promote science as the mind's highest achievement and advocated a purely empirical approach to nature and society. -Emphasized empiricism.
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.
Primitivism
The incorporation in early-20th-century Western art of stylistic elements from the artifacts of Africa, Oceania, and the native people of the Americas.
Berthe Morisot, Villa at the Seaside, 1874
This painting was not only included in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 but was also the first listed in the catalogue. Many of Morisot's paintings feature the women and children who populated her refined domestic life. Here, indications of her upper-class status abound, such as in the dress of the female figure and in the deluxe vacation spot on the beach. Yet Morisot's strikingly modern composition is anything but conventional. Quick, confident brushwork describes the white lace trim along the ruffled edges of a black skirt, the transparent veil that blocks the sun and sand from the woman's face and the architecture of the veranda that separates the woman and girl from the public beach. Together these details magnificently define both the contemporary state of avant-garde painting as well as that of French femininity.
Pablo Picasso, Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
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Societe anonyme
-Exhibition, or society with no jury, politically democratic, and held annually.
Avant garde
-French, "advance guard" (in a platoon). Late-19th-century and 20th-century artists who emphasized innovation and challenged established convention in their work. Also used as an adjective. -Make art for each other.
Paul Gauguin, Magus (Self-portrait), 1889
-described as a caricature. -Subject under intense analysis, the meaning is unclear but it is thought that Gauguin depicted himself as a magus; a master that possesses the power of magic by virtue of talent and genius.
Haussmanization
-the creative destruction of something for the betterment of society.
Realism
A movement that emerged in mid-19th-century France. Realist artists represented the subject matter of everyday life (especially subjects that previously had been considered inappropriate for depiction) in a relatively naturalistic mode.
Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889
-Similarly illustrative of van Gogh's "expressionist" method is Starry night, painted a year before his death. -Painted it within an asylum where he committed himself. -van Gogh did not represent the sky's appearance, but instead communicated his feelings about the electrifying vastness of the universe, filled with whirling and exploding stars, with the earth and humanity huddling beneath it. -The turbulent and immense use of blue suggests a quiet but pervasive depression.
Fauvism
An early-20th-century art movement led by Henri Matisse. For the Fauves, color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning.
Monet, Saint-Lazare Train Station, 1877
When he painted The Saint-Lazare Station, Monet had just left Argenteuil to settle in Paris. After several years of painting in the countryside, he turned to urban landscapes. At a time when the critics Duranty and Zola exhorted artists to paint their own times, Monet tried to diversify his sources of inspiration and longed to be considered, like Manet, Degas and Caillebotte, a painter of modern life. In 1877, settling in the Nouvelle Athènes area, Claude Monet asked for permission to work in the Gare Saint-Lazare that marked its boundary on one side. Indeed, this was an ideal setting for someone who sought the changing effects of light, movement, clouds of steam and a radically modern motif. From there followed a series of paintings with different viewpoints including views of the vast hall. In spite of the apparent geometry of the metallic frame, what prevails here is really the effects of colour and light rather than a concern for describing machines or travellers in detail. Certain zones, true pieces of pure painting, achieve an almost abstract vision. This painting was praised by another painter of modern life, Gustave Caillebotte, whose painting was often the opposite of Monet's.
