Art History II Exam

Great migration

(WW) , movement of over 300,000 African American from the rural south into Northern cities between 1914 and 1920 Movement of African Americans from the South to the North for jobs. movement of over 300,000 African American from the rural south into Northern cities between 1914 and 1920

Formalism

(p. 1089) An approach to the understanding, appreciation, and valuation of art based almost solely on considerations of form. The Formalist's approach tends to regard an artwork as independent of its time and place of making.

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830

-Revolutionaries are from different walks of life -Liberty is the woman who is leading the french people -liberty united everyone against this injustice -romantic: attraction and repulsion of dead figures, allegorical figure by liberty, fires, smoky atmosphere, meant to inspire your outrage on injustice, -balances the colors of red white and blue of the flag -revolution uniting people across the different wealths/people

Bauhaus

A Weimar (German) architectural school created by Walter Gropius which combined the fine arts and functionalism A German interdisciplinary school of fine and applied arts that brought together many leading modern architects, designers, and theatrical innovators. a German style of architecture begun by Walter Gropius in 1918

collage

A composition made of cut and pasted scraps of materials, sometimes with lines or forms added by the artist. artistic composition of materials pasted over a surface; an assemblage of diverse elements work of art put together from fragments

Pastels

A high quality form of chalk with a wide range of hues. (p. 930) Dry pigment, chalk, and gum in stick or crayon form. Also: a work of art made with pastels.

Romanticism

A new intellectual trend, known as Romanticism, started as a literary movement in the 1790s and served as a counterpoint to Enlightenment rational- ism. It critiqued the idea that the world was knowable and ruled by reason alone. The central premise of Romanticism was that an exploration of emotions, the imagination, and intuition—areas of the mind not addressed by Enlightenment philosophy—could lead to a more nuanced under- standing of the world. Rather than one replacing the other, Romanticism and Enlightenment thought coexisted as different parts of a complex cultural whole. a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.

capriccio

A painting or print of a fantastic, imaginary landscape, usually with architecture.

Harlem Renaissance

A period in the 1920s when African-American achievements in art and music and literature flourished Between 1910 and 1930, hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated from the rural, mostly agricultural American South to the urban, industrialized North to escape racial oppression and find greater social and economic opportunities. This First Great Migration prompted the formation of the nationwide New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance in New York, which called for greater social and political activism among African Americans. Harlem's wealthy middle-class African-American community produced some of the nation's most talented artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the jazz musician Duke Ellington, the novelist Jean Toomer, and the poet Langston Hughes. The movement's intellectual leader was Alain Locke (1886-1954), a critic and philosophy professor who argued that black artists should seek their artistic roots in the traditional arts of Africa rather than assimilate within mainstream American or European artistic traditions.

Enlightenment

A philosophical movement which started in Europe in the 1700's and spread to the colonies. It emphasized reason and the scientific method. Writers of the enlightenment tended to focus on government, ethics, and science, rather than on imagination, emotions, or religion. Many members of the Enlightenment rejected traditional religious beliefs in favor of Deism, which holds that the world is run by natural laws without the direct intervention of God.

Japonisme

A style in French and American nineteenth-century art that was highly influenced by Japanese art, especially prints. The French fascination with all things Japanese. Second half of 19th century. Impressionist and Post-impressionist were especially impressed with bold contour lines, flat areas of color, and cropped edges in Japanese woodblock prints.

Assemblage

A three-dimensional composition in which a collection of objects is unified in a sculptural work *Artwork created by gathering and manipulating two- and/or three- dimensional found objects.* (1040)

Mark Rothko, Lavender and Mulberry, 1959

Abstract Expressionism 1941-Today

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950

Abstract Expressionism 1941-Today In 1950, while Pollock painted AUTUMN RHYTHM (NUMBER 30) (FIG. 32-82), Hans Namuth filmed him and Rudolph Burkhardt photographed him (FIG. 32-83). Pol- lock worked in a renovated barn, where he could reach into the laid canvas from all four sides. The German expatriate artist Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) had poured and dripped paint before Pollock, but Pollock's unrestrained gestures transformed the idea of painting itself by mov- ing around and within the canvas, dripping and scoring commercial-grade enamel paint (rather than specialist artist's paint) onto it using sticks and trowels. Some have described Pollock's arcs and whorls of paint as chaotic, but he saw them as labyrinths that led viewers along complex paths and into an organic, calligraphic web of natural and biomorphic forms. Pollock's compositions lack hierarchical arrangement, contain multiple focal points, and deny perspectival space. Art historians have referred to such paintings as "all-over compositions," because of the uniform treatment of the canvas from edge to edge and how this invites viewers to explore across the surface rather than to focus on one particular area. These self-contained paintings burst with anxious energy, ready to explode at any moment. Autumn Rhythm is heroic in scale, almost 9 feet tall by over 17 feet wide. It engulfs the viewer's entire field of vision. According to Krasner, Pollock was a "jazz addict" who spent many hours listening to the explosively improvised bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. His interests extended to Native American art, which he associated with his western roots and which enjoyed widespread coverage in popular and art magazines in the 1930s. Pollock was particularly intrigued by the images and processes of Navajo sand painters who demonstrated their work at the Natural History Museum in New York. He also drew on Jung's theories of the collective unconscious. But Pollock was more than the sum of his influences. His paintings communicate on a grand, Modernist, primal level. In a radio interview, he said that he was creating for "the age of the airplane, the atom bomb, and the radio."

Realism

Against this social and political backdrop a new intellectual movement known as Realism originated in the novels of Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and others who wrote about the real lives of the urban lower classes. What art historians have labeled Realism is less of a style than a commitment to paint the modern world honestly, without turning away from the brutal truths of life for all people, poor as well as privileged.

Abstract Expressionism

American artists were most deeply affected by the work of the European Surrealist artists in New York, but ultimately artists developed their own uniquely American artistic identities by drawing from, but radically reimagining, European and American Modernism—coming to be known as Abstract Expressionists. An artistic movement that focused on expressing emotion and feelings through abstract images and colors, lines and shapes. The term "Abstract Expressionism" describes the art of a fairly wide range of artists in New York in the 1940s and early 1950s. It was not a formally organized movement, but rather a loosely affiliated group of artists who worked in the city and were bound by a common purpose: to express their profound social alienation after World War II and make a new kind of art.

Impressionism

An artistic movement that sought to capture a momentary feel, or impression, of the piece they were drawing Major Western artistic style that gained prominence in the second half of the 1800s and into the 1900s.Against Realism, visual impression of a moment, style that seeks to capture a feeling or experience, often very colorful. a style of art where painters try to catch visual impressions made by color, light, and shadows Impressionism developed in France in the nineteenth century and is based on the practice of painting out of doors and spontaneously 'on the spot' rather than in a studio from sketches. Main impressionist subjects were landscapes and scenes of everyday life

Primitivism

An early 20th century artistic movement which was attracted to the directness, instinctivness and exoticism nonurban cultures The borrowing of subjects or forms, usually from non-European or prehistoric sources, by Western artists in an attempt to infuse work with expressive qualities attributed to other cultures, especially colonized cultures.

Grand Manner

An elevated style of painting popular in the eighteenth century in which the artist looked to the ancients and to the Renaissance for inspiration; for portraits as well as history painting, the artist would adopt the poses, compositions, and attitudes of the Renaissance and antique models. 940

Prairie School

Around 1900, he and several other architects in the Oak Park suburb of Chicago—together known as the Prairie School—began to design low, horizontal houses with flat roofs and heavy overhangs that echoed the flat plains of the prairie in the Midwest. 1890s-1920sLow and wide projections that emphasize horizontality, broad eves, stucco facades, windows and doors tucked under eaves for privacy Typically associated with FLW

Picasso, Mandolin and Clarinet, 1913

Cubism Picasso employed collage three-dimensionally to produce Synthetic Cubist sculpture, such as MANDOLIN AND CLARINET . Composed of wood scraps, the sculpture suggests the Cubist subject of two musical instruments, here shown at right angles to each other. Sculpture had traditionally been carved, modeled, or cast. Picasso's sculptural collage was a new idea and introduced assemblage, giving sculptors the option not only of carving or modeling masses to sit within space, but also of construct- ing three-dimensional works from combinations of found objects and unconventional materials, assembled in such a way that each part maintains its own identity while at the same time contributing to a new, combined form.

Biomorphic

Denoting the biologically or organically inspired shapes and forms that were routinely included in abstracted Modern art in the early twentieth century. (1073) art based on irregular abstract forms found in nature

fete galante

French "amorous festival" a type of roccoco painting depicting the outdoor amusement of French upper-class society A subject in painting depicting well-dressed people at leisure in a park or country setting. It is most often associated with eighteenth- century French Rococo painting.

Salon des Refuses

French for "exhibition of rejects" is generally an exhibition of works rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon, but the term is most famously used to refer to the Salon des Refusés of 1863. A storm of protest erupted, prompting Emperor Napoleon III to order an exhibition of the rejected work called the "Salon des Refusés" ("Salon of the Rejected Ones").

en plein air painting

French term (meaning "in the open air") describing the Impressionist practice of painting outdoors so artists could have direct access to the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere while working.

German Expressionism

German expressionism was an early twentieth century German art movement that emphasized the artist's inner feelings or ideas over replicating reality, and was characterised by simplified shapes, bright colours and gestural marks or brushstrokes. Began in 1905 with Die Brucke (The Bridge). They hoped to break the academic, traditional, and impressionistic modes and create art that was a creative impulse. They often published journals and exhibition catalogs using their own prints as illustrations. The German artist Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), born in the final weeks of World War II, builds on the style and political undertones of German Expressionism from the early twentieth century (see Chapter 32). Heavily worked with thick layers of paint and shellac, HEATH OF THE BRANDENBURG MARCH (FIG. 33-36) evokes the historical tradition of German landscape paint- ing to confront his country's Nazi past. The linear perspective of the central road pulls the viewer into a scorched and barren countryside, alluding to centuries of past warfare in this region around Berlin. (1124)

Francisco de Goya, Third of May, 1808, 1814-1815

Goya's painting has been lauded for its brilliant transformation of Christian iconography and its poignant portrayal of man's inhumanity to man. The central figure of the painting, who is clearly a poor laborer, takes the place of the crucified Christ; he is sacrificing himself for the good of his nation

Grand Tour

Grand Tour (p. 929) Popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an extended tour of cultural sites in France and Italy intended to finish the education of a young upper-class person primarily from Britain or North America. a cultural tour of Europe formerly undertaken, especially in the 18th century, by a young man of the upper classes as a part of his education.

Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal on Stage, 1874

Impressionism photographic influence. a contrived scene based on such studio studies, calculated to delight the eye but also to refocus the mind on the stern realities of modern life. Several of the dancers look bored or exhausted; others stretch, perhaps to mitigate the toll this physical work took on their bodies. Because ballerinas generally came from lower-class families and showed their scantily clad bodies in pub- lic—something that "respectable" bourgeois women did not do—they were widely assumed to be sexually avail- able, and they often attracted the attentions of wealthy men willing to support them in exchange for sexual favors. In the right background of this painting slouch two well- dressed, middle-aged men, each probably a wealthy "protector" of one of the dancers. The composition is set in a space that seems to tilt upward, as if viewed from a box close to the stage. The abrupt foreshortening is emphasized by the dark scrolls of the double basses that jut up from the lower left. The angular viewpoint from above may derive from Japanese prints, which Degas collected, while the seemingly arbitrary cropping of figures on the left suggests photography, which he also practiced.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893

Impressionism 1870s-1900. realism. Henry Ossawa Tanner was the United States' first African-American celebrity artist. His training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (under the guidance of Thomas Eakins) and at the Académie Julian in Paris (with Jean-Léon Gérôme) put him in the unique position of having experienced two vastly different approaches to painting— American Realism and French academic painting. He was also one of the few artists to have had such training at a time when there were many barriers to education for African-Americans. Though Tanner lived most of his life in France and became well known for his lush biblical paintings, The Banjo Lesson is his most famous work and the painting that has become emblematic with his oeuvre.

Futurism

In Italy, Cubism developed into Futurism, with an emphasis on portraying technology and a sense of speed. In 1908, Italy was a state in crisis. Huge disparities of wealth separated the north from the south; four-fifths of the country was illiterate; poverty and near-starvation were rampant; and as many as 50,000 people had recently died in one of the nation's worst earthquakes. On February 20, 1909, Milanese poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) published "Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" on the front page of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. He attacked everything old, dull, and "feminine" and proposed to shake Italy free of its past by embracing an exhilarating, "masculine," "futuristic," and even dangerous world based on the thrill, speed, energy, and power of modern urban life.

John Constable, The Haywain, 1821, oil o/canvas

It was considerably better received in France where it was praised by Théodore Géricault. The painting caused a sensation when it was exhibited with other works by Constable at the 1824 Paris Salon (it has been suggested that the inclusion of Constable's paintings in the exhibition was a tribute to Géricault, who died early that year). In that exhibition, The Hay Wain was singled out for a gold medal awarded by Charles X of France, a cast of which is incorporated into the picture's frame. The works by Constable in the exhibition inspired a new generation of French painters, including Eugène Delacroix

Fauvism

Means "wild beast". Bold, shocking color. Joyous tone, usually. Matisse The paintings exhibited in 1905 by André Derain (1880-1954), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958) were filled with such brilliant colors and blunt brushwork that the critic Louis Vauxcelles described the young painters as fauves ("wild beasts"), the French term by which they soon became known. These artists took the French tradition of color and strong brushwork to new heights of intensity and expressive power and entirely rethought the painting's surface.

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784-1785

Neoclassism. In 1785 visitors to the Paris Salon were transfixed by one painting, Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii. It depicts three men, brothers, saluting toward three swords held up by their father as the women behind him grieve—no one had ever seen a painting like it. Similar subjects had always been seen in the Salons before but the physicality and intense emotion of the painting was new and undeniable. The revolutionary painting changed French art but was David also calling for another kind of revolution—a real one?

New York School

New York School artists used abstract means to express various kinds of emotional states, not all of them as urgent or improvisatory as those of the Action painters. Group of abstract expressionists lived and worked in New York during the 1940's and 1950's

sublime

Of a concept, thing, or state of greatness or vastness with high spiritual, moral, intellectual, or emotional value; or something awe- inspiring. The sublime was a goal to which many nineteenth-century artists aspired in their artworks. p.973

picturesque

Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin. Picturesque, along with the aesthetic and cultural strands of Gothic and Celticism, was a part of the emerging Romantic sensibility of the 18th century. Aesthetic experience was not just a rational decision - one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beautiful; rather it came naturally as a matter of basic human instinct. enlightenment idea.

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1885-1887

Post-Impressionism 1880s-1914. a mountain close to his home in Aix, which he depicted in hundreds of drawings and about 30 oil paintings between the 1880s and his death in 1906. The painting presents the mountain rising above the Arc Valley, which is dotted with buildings and trees and crossed at the far right by a railroad viaduct. Fram- ing the scene to the left is an evergreen tree, which echoes the contours of the mountains, creating visual harmony between the two principal elements of the composition. The even light, stable atmosphere, and absence of human activity create the sensation of timeless stillness. Cézanne's handling of paint is deliberate and con- trolled. His brushstrokes, which vary from short, parallel hatchings to light lines to broader swaths of flat color, weave together the elements of the painting into a unified but flattened visual space. The surface design vies with the pictorial effect of receding space, generating tension between the illusion of three dimensions within the picture and the physical reality of its two-dimensional surface. Recession into depth is suggested by the tree in the fore- ground—a repoussoir (French for "something that pushes back") that helps draw the eye into the valley—and by the transition from the saturated hues in the foreground to the lighter values in the background, creating an effect of atmospheric perspective. But recession into depth is challenged by other more intense colors in both the foreground and background and by the tree branches in the sky, which follow the contours of the mountain, avoiding overlap- ping and subtly suggesting that the two are on the same plane. Photographs of this scene show that Cézanne created a composition in accordance with a harmony that he felt the scene demanded, rather than reproducing in detail the appearance of the landscape. His commitment to the painting as a work of art, which he called "something other than reality"—not a representation of nature but "a construction after nature"—was a crucial step toward the modern art of the next century.

Jean Antoine-Watteau, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, 1717

Rococo painting. created new category for it. fête galante, or gallant party.caused quite a stir with its vibrant colours, bold brushstrokes, and hazy atmosphere. The lush landscape is idyllic and infused with bright blue skies, soft green leaves, and warm brown earth. Watteau was given approval to submit the painting in 1712, but only actually submitted it in 1717. The work - The Pilgrimage to Cythera - proved to be one of his masterpieces, and he was admitted to the Academy as a painter of "fêtes galantes" - courtly scenes in an idyllic country setting. But does the work actually depict couples setting out for the island or returning from it? Art historians have come up with a wide variety of interpretations of the allegory of the voyage to the island of love.

avant-garde

Term derived from the French military word meaning "before the group," or "vanguard." Avant-garde denotes those artists or concepts of a strikingly new, experimental, or radical nature for their time. (p.989)

Color Field Painting

The Color Field painters moved in a different direction, painting large, flat areas of color to produce more- contemplative moods. Rothko thought of his shapes as fundamental ideas expressed in rectangular form uninterrupted by a recognizable subject, which sit in front of a painted field (hence the name "Color Field painting"). A technique in abstract painting developed in the 1950s. It focuses on the lyrical effects of large areas of color, often poured or stained onto the canvas. Newman, Rothko, and Frankenthaler painted in this manner.

Post-Impressionism

The English critic Roger Fry coined the term "Post- Impressionism" in 1910 in order to describe a diverse group of painters whose work he had collected for an exhibition. He acknowledged that these artists did not share a unified approach to art, but they all used Impressionism as a springboard for developing their individual styles. A late nineteenth-century style that relies on the Impressionist use of color and spontaneous brushwork but that employs these elements as expressive devices. An artistic movement that expressed world that could not normally be seen, like dreams and fantasy. the work or style of a varied group of late 19th-century and early 20th-century artists including Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne. They reacted against the naturalism of the impressionists to explore color, line, and form, and the emotional response of the artist, a concern that led to the development of expressionism.

Neoclassicism

The artists and intellectuals who found inspiration in the Classical past were instrumental in the development of Neoclassicism, which was both a way of viewing the world and an influential movement in the visual arts. Neo- classicism (neo means "new") sought to present Classical ideals and subject matter in a style derived from Classical Greek and Roman sources. Neoclassical paintings reflect the clear forms, tight compositions, and shallow space of ancient relief sculpture. Because the ancient world was considered the source of British and European democracy, secular government, and civilized thought and action, its art was viewed as the embodiment of timeless civic and moral lessons. Neoclassical paintings and sculptures were frequently painted for and displayed in public places in order to inspire patriotism, national- ism, and courage. Neoclassicism was especially popular in Britain, America, and France as a visual expression of the state and political stability. the revival of a classical style or treatment in art, literature, architecture, or music.

simultaneous contrast

The effect created by two complementary colors seen in juxtaposition. Each color seems more intense in this context. When two different colors come into direct contact, the contrast intensifies the difference between them. the optical alteration of a color by a surrounding color

Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, 1834

The second painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition later in 1835. It shows a similar scene from further downstream, closer to Waterloo Bridge, with the flames and smoke blown dramatically over the Thames as spectators on the river bank and in boats look on. This painting was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1942 as a bequest from John L. Severance(son of oil magnate Louis Severance).

Historicism

The strong consciousness of and attention to the institutions, themes, styles, and forms of the past, made accessible by historical research, textual study, and archaeology. (p.981) Historicism or historism (German: Historismus) comprises artistic styles that draw their inspiration from recreating historic styles or imitating the work of historic artisans. ... Influences of historicism remained strong until the 1950s in many countries

Rococo

The term Rococo combines the Italian word barocco (an irregularly shaped pearl, possibly the source of the word "baroque") and the French rocaille (a popular form of garden or interior ornamentation using shells and pebbles) to describe the refined and fanciful style that became fashionable in parts of Europe during the eighteenth century. The Rococo developed in France around 1715, when the duc d'Orléans, regent for the boy- king Louis XV (ruled 1715-1774), moved his home and the French court from Versailles to Paris. The movement spread quickly across Europe Very elaborate and ornate (in decorating or metaphorically, as in speech and writing); relating to a highly ornate style of art and architecture in 18th-century France

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

This work is significant because it pushes the idea of art and its function in culture. Duchamp is working with ideas that were circulating during the Renaissance and helps define art as when an object is selected and then designated in some way. Dada Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing ...

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space integrates trajectories of speed and force into the representation of a striding figure. It does not depict a particular person at a specific moment, but rather synthesizes the process of walking into a single body. For Boccioni, one of the key figures in the Italian Futurist movement, this was an ideal form: a figure in constant motion, immersed in space, engaged with the forces acting upon it.

Edouard Manet, Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863

While female nudes are prevalent throughout the history of art, they had, up until The Luncheon on the Grass, always represented figures from mythology or allegory. By placing an anonymous unclothed woman in an everyday setting, Manet re-contextualized the age-old subject and redefined what constitutes as fine art—all with a hint of irony."So, they'd prefer me to do a nude, would they?" he remarked in a letter to French journalist Antonin Proust in 1862. "Fine I'll do them a nude . . . Then I suppose they'll really tear me to pieces. They'll tell me I'm just copying the Italians now, rather than the Spanish. Ah, well, they can say what they like."

surrealism

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

Odalisque

a female slave in the harems of the East. It was a favorite subject of the 19th century artists in a reclining position La Grande Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres' contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres' break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism. Grande Odalisque attracted wide criticism when it was first shown. It is renowned for the elongated proportions and lack of anatomical realism. The work is owned by the Louvre Museum, Paris which purchased the work in 1899. Turkish word for "harem slave girl" or "concubine."

Camille Pissarro, Wooded Landscape at L'Hermitage Pontoise, 1878

a foreground com- position of trees screens the view of a rural path and village behind, flattening space and partly masking the figure at the lower right. Pissarro applies his paint thickly here, with a multitude of short, multidirectional brushstrokes. painting scenes where the urban meets the rural. At times he portrayed the rural landscape on its own, but he often shows urban visitors to the countryside and small towns or factories embedded in the land as the city encroaches upon them. Born in the Dutch West Indies to French parents and raised near Paris, Pissarro studied art in Paris during the 1850s and early 1860s. In 1870, while he and Monet lived in London, Pissarro had already taken up the principles that would later blossom in Impressionism. The two artists worked together in England, trying to capture what Pissarro described as "plein air light and fugitive effects" by lighten- ing color intensity and hue and loosening brushstrokes. Following his return to France, Pissarro settled in Pontoise, a small, hilly village northwest of Paris where he worked for most of the 1870s in an Impressionist style, using high-keyed color and short brushstrokes to capture fleeting qualities of light and atmosphere. In the late 1870s, his work became more visually complex, with darkened colors.

Veduta

a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or, actually more often print, of a cityscape or some other vista. Italian for "vista" or "view." Paintings, drawings, or prints, often of expansive city scenes or of harbors.

salon

a social gathering of intellectuals and artists, like those held in the homes of wealthy women in Paris and other European cities during the Enlightenment (p. 923) A large room for entertaining guests or a periodic social or intellectual gathering, often of prominent people, held in such a room. Also: a hall or gallery for exhibiting works of art.

Divisionism/Pointillism

a technique based on the scientific juxtaposition of pure dabs of color; the brain blends these colors together automatically in the involuntary process of optical mixing; technically, pointillism differs in that it is pure dots of color distributed more systematically on a white ground the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically

Dada

a transnational movement with distinct local manifestations that arose during the war in Zürich and New York, then spread to Berlin, Paris, Cologne, and Hannover. If Modern art until that time questioned the traditions of art, Dada went further to question the concept of art itself. Witnessing how thoughtlessly life was discarded in the trenches, Dada mocked the senselessness of rational thought and even the foundations of modern society. It embraced a "mocking iconoclasm" even in its name, which has no real or fixed meaning. Dada is baby talk in German; in French it means "hobbyhorse"; in Romanian and Russian, "yes, yes"; in the Kru African dialect, "the tail of a sacred cow." Dada artists annihilated the conventional understanding of art as something precious, replacing it with a strange and irrational art focused on ideas and actions rather than objects.

Regionalism

an American realist modern art movement that included paintings, murals, lithographs, and illustrations depicting realistic scenes of rural and small-town America primarily in the Midwest. It arose in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, and ended in the 1940s due to the end of World War II and a lack of development within the movement. It reached its height of popularity from 1930 to 1935, as it was widely appreciated for its reassuring images of the American heartland during the Great Depression.[1] Despite major stylistic differences between specific artists, Regionalist art in general was in a relatively conservative and traditionalist style that appealed to popular American sensibilities, while strictly opposing the perceived domination of French art.[2] an element in literature that conveys a realistic portrayal of a specific geographical locale, using the locale and its influences as a major part of the plot

Action Painting

an abstract painting in which the artist drips or splatters paint onto a surface like a canvas in order to create his or her work Using broad gestures to drip or pour paint onto a pictorial surface. Associated with mid-twentieth-century American Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock.

Cubism (Analytic and Synthetic)

an early 20th-century style and movement in art, especially painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage. Analytic: Braque's and Picasso's paintings of 1909 and 1910 initiated what is known as Analytic Cubism because of the way the artists broke objects into parts as if to analyze them. Analytic Cubism begins to resemble the actual process of perception, during which we examine objects from various points of view and reassemble our glances into a whole object in our brain Synthetic: This second major phase of Cubism is known as Synthetic Cubism because of the way the artists created complex compositions by combining and transforming individual elements, as in a chemical synthesis. Picasso's BOTTLE OF SUZE (LA BOUTEILLE DE SUZE), like many of the works he and Braque created from 1912 to 1914, is a collage (from the French coller, meaning "to glue"), a work composed of separate elements pasted together. At the center, assembled newsprint and construction paper suggest a tray or round table supporting a glass and a bottle of liquor with an actual label. Around this arrangement Picasso pasted larger pieces of newspaper and wallpaper.

New Negro Movement

an effort to promote racial equality by celebrating the cultural contributions of African Americans

Readymade

an everyday object presented as a work of art An object from popular or material culture presented without further manipulation as an artwork by the artist.

Armory Show

an exhibit in New York in 1913 that introduced Paris-based Modernism to America A New York painting exhibit in 1913 that featured abstract paintings. 1913 - The first art show in the U.S., organized by the Ashcan School. Was most Americans first exposure to European Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, and caused a modernist revolution in American art.

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28, 1912

crusade against conventional aesthetic values and his dream of a better, more spiritual future through the transformative powers of art. The rider is featured in many woodcuts, temperas, and oils, from its first appearance in the artist's folk-inspired paintings, executed in his

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

example of expressive qualities of a line. Post impressionism 1840's-1914. painted near the asylum of Saint-Rémy. Above the quiet town, the sky pulsates with celestial rhythms and exploding stars. Con- templating life and death in a letter, Van Gogh wrote: "Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star." This idea is made visible here by the cypress tree, a traditional symbol of both death and eternal life, which rises to link the terrestrial and celestial realms. The brightest star in the sky is actually a planet, Venus, which is associated with love: It is possible that the picture's extraordinary energy also expresses Van Gogh's euphoric hope of gaining in death the love that had eluded him in life. The painting is a riot of brushstrokes of intense color that writhe across the surface. This is clearly more a record of what Van Gogh felt than what he saw. During the last year and a half of his life, before he made this painting, he had experienced repeated psychological crises that lasted for days or weeks. While they were raging, he wanted to hurt himself, heard loud noises in his head, and could not paint. The stress of these attacks led him to the asylum where he painted The Starry Night, and eventually to suicide in July 1890. In painting from imagination more than from nature in The Starry Night, Van Gogh may have been following the advice of his close friend Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who once counseled another artist, "Don't paint from nature too much. Art is an abstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation that will result."

Mary Cassatt, Woman Bathing, 1890-91

exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints. These ukiyo-e images, "pictures of the floating world," as they were evocatively called, were comprised mostly of scenes of urban bourgeois pleasure—geishas, beautiful women, sumo wrestlers, kabuki actors—and pictures of the natural beauty around Edo (present day Tokyo)—the mists of Mount Fuji, cherry blossoms, rain showers, and surging waves along the port of Kanagawa.

Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863

he first version of Cabanel's Birth of Venus (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) created a sensation at the Salon of 1863, which was dubbed the "Salon of the Venuses" owing to the number of alluring nudes on view. Embodying the ideals of academic art, the careful modeling, silky brushwork, and mythological subject of Cabanel's canvas proved a winning combination: the Salon picture was purchased by no less than Napoleon III for his personal collection. In 1875,

William Hogarth, The Marriage Contract, 1743-1745

illustrates the disastrous consequences of marrying for money rather than love. The basic story is of a marriage arranged by two self-seeking fathers - a spendthrift nobleman who needs cash and a wealthy City of London merchant who wants to buy into the aristocracy. It was Hogarth's first moralising series satirising the upper classes.The six pictures were painted in about 1743 to be engraved and then offered for sale after the engravings were finished. The engravings are uncoloured, reversed versions of the paintings. Published in 1745, the engravings were offered to subscribers at a guinea a set. They proved instantly popular and gave Hogarth's work a wide audience. The paintings were offered for sale by twelve noon on 6 June 1751, but only attracted two bidders, one of whom bought them all for £126.

Georgia O'Keeffe, City Night, 1926

not unambiguous celebrations of lofty buildings. She portrays the skyscrapers from a low vantage point so that they appear to loom ominously over the viewer; their dark tonalities, stark forms, and exaggerated perspective produce a sense of menace that also appears in the art of other American Modernists.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick C. Robie House, Chicago, 1909

one of Wright's early Prairie Style masterpieces. A central chimney, above a fireplace that radiated heat throughout the house in the bitter Chicago winter, forms the center of the sprawling design. Low, flat overhanging roofs—dramatically cantilevered on both sides of the chimney—shade against the summer sun, and open porches provide places to sleep outside on cool summer nights. Low bands of windows—many with stained glass—surround the house, creating a colored screen between the interior and the outside world, while also inviting those inside to look through the windows into the garden beyond. The main story is one long space divided into living and dining areas by a free-standing fireplace. There are no dividing walls. Wright had visited the Japanese exhibit at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and was deeply influenced by the aesthetics of Japanese architecture, particularly its sense of space and screenlike windows (see "Shoin Design" in Chapter 26 on page 835). Wright's homes frequently featured built-in closets and bookcases, and he hid heating and lighting fixtures when possible. He also designed and arranged the furniture for his interiors (FIG. 32-42). Here, machine-cut components create the chairs' modern geo- metric designs, while their high backs huddle around the table to form the intimate effect of a room within a room. Wright integrated lights and flower holders into posts near the table's corners so that there would be no need for lights or flowers on the table.

Pablo Picasso, Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon), 1907

one of the most radical and complex paintings of the twentieth century. "Demoiselle" was a common euphemism for prostitute at this time, and Avignon was the name of a street in the red-light district in Barcelona. The work's boldness, however, resides not only in its subject matter, but also in its size: nearly 8 feet square. Picasso may have undertaken such a large painting in 1907 to compete with both Matisse—who had exhibited The Joy of Life (SEE FIG. 32-4) in the Salon des Indépendants of 1906— and Cézanne—whose Large Bathers (SEE FIG. 31-59) was shown the same year. Like Matisse and Cézanne, Picasso revived and changed the ideas of large-scale academic his- tory painting, using the traditional subject of nude women shown in an interior space. There are other echoes of the 1038 Chapter 32 Modern Art in Europe and the Americas, 1900-1950 Western tradition in the handling of the figures. The two women in the center display themselves to the viewer like Venus rising from the sea (SEE FIGS. 20-35, 31-5), while the one to the left takes a rigid pose with a striding stance, recalling a Greek kouros (SEE FIG. 5-18), and the one seated on the right might suggest the pose of Manet's Luncheon on the Grass (SEE FIG. 31-17). But not all visual references point to the Western tradition. Iberian sources stand behind the faces of the three leftmost figures, with their flattened features and wide, almond-shaped eyes. The masklike faces of the two figures at right imitate African art. Picasso has created an unsettling picture from these sources. The women are shielded by masks, flattened and fractured into sharp, angular shapes. The space they inhabit is incoherent and convulsive. The central pair raise their arms in a conventional gesture of accessibility but contra- dict it with their hard, piercing gazes and tight mouths that create what art historian Leo Steinberg called "a tidal wave of female aggression." Even the fruit displayed in the fore- ground, symbols of female sexuality, seems brittle and dangerous. These women, Picasso suggests, are not the gentle and passive creatures that men would like them to be. This viewpoint contradicts an enduring tradition, prevalent at least since the Renaissance, of portraying sexual availability in the female nude, just as strongly as Picasso's treatment of space shatters the reliance on orderly perspective, also standard since the Renaissance. Most of Picasso's friends were shocked by his new work. Matisse, for example, accused Picasso of making a joke of Modern art and threatened to break off their friendship. But one artist, Georges Braque, enthusiastically embraced Picasso's radical ideas—he saw in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon a potential for new visual experiments. In 1907-1908, Picasso and Braque began a close working relationship that lasted until the latter went to war in 1914. Together, they developed Picasso's formal innovations by flattening pictorial space, incorporating multiple perspectives within a single picture, and fracturing form, all features that they had admired in Cézanne's late paintings. According to Braque, "We were like two mountain climbers roped together."

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849

realism one year after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their influential pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto) 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.

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875, oil on canvas

realism. The Gross Clinic is recognized as one of the greatest American paintings ever made. The young and little-known Eakins created it specifically for Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition, intending to showcase his talents as an artist and to honor the scientific achievements of his native Philadelphia.Choosing the city's world-famous surgeon and teacher Dr. Samuel Gross as his subject, Eakins sets the scene in Jefferson Medical College's surgical amphitheater.

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930. Oil on beaverboard.

regionalism was purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago and established Wood's national fame. This picture embodied all that was good and bad about the heartland in the 1930s. Wood, who later taught at the University of Iowa, portrays an aging father standing with his unmarried daughter in front of their Gothic Revival framed house. Even for the time their clothes are old-fashioned. Wood's dentist and his sister Nan—wearing a homemade ricracedged apron and their mother's cameo—posed for the figures, and the building was modeled on a modest small-town home in Eldon, Iowa. The daughter's long, sad face echoes her father's; she is unmarried and likely to stay that way. In 1930, husbands were hard to come by in the Midwest because many young men had fled the farms for jobs in Chicago. With its tightly painted descriptive detail, this painting is a homage to the Flemish Renaissance painters that Wood admired.

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel 1, 1940-41

sequence of 60 paintings, depicts the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and World War II—a development that had received little previous public attention.

Meret Oppenheim, Object (Luncheon in Fur), 1936

surrealism

Automatism

the avoidance of conscious intention in producing works of art, especially by using mechanical techniques or subconscious associations. A technique in which artists abandon the usual intellectual control over their brushes or pencils to allow the subconscious to create the artwork without rational interference (1072)

George Seurat, Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-86

was first exhibited at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. The theme of weekend leisure is typically Impressionist, but the rigorous technique, the stiff formality of the figures, and the highly calculated geometry of the composition produce a solemn effect quite at odds with the casual naturalism of Impressionism. Seurat painted the entire canvas using only 11 colors in three values. When viewed from a distance of about 9 feet, the painting reads as figures in a park rendered in many colors and tones; but when viewed from a distance of 3 feet, the individual marks of color become more apparent, while the forms dissolve into abstraction. From its first appearance, the painting has been the subject of a number of conflicting interpretations. Con- temporary accounts of the island indicate that on Sundays (the newly designated official day off for French working families) it was noisy, littered, and chaotic. Seurat may have intended to represent an ideal image of harmonious, blended working-class and middle-class life and leisure. But some art historians see Seurat satirizing the sterile habits, rigid attitudes, and domineering presence of the growing Parisian middle class—or simply engaging in an intellectual exercise on the nature of form and color. Seurat's goal was to find ways to create such retinal vibrations to enliven the painted surface, using distinctively short, multidirectional strokes of almost pure color in what came to be known as "Divisionism" or "Pointillism." In theory, these juxtaposed strokes of color would merge in the viewer's eye to produce the impression of other colors. When perceived from a certain distance they would appear more luminous and intense than the same colors seen separately, while on close inspection the strokes and colors would remain distinct and separate. adjacent objects not only cast reflections of their own color onto their neighbors, but also create the effect of their complementary color.