Art history midterm

What is an archetype, according to Carl Jung?

A "primordial unit" that manifests in myth around the world and, with other archetypes, makes up the collective unconscious whereby we understand the world and ourselves, for example, the Hero, the Villain, the Sage, the Trickster are all common archetypes

What did the term Pop Art imply?

A genuine appreciation for the imagery of the commercial environment and a rejection of the distinction between highbrow and popular culture

What were Happenings?

A kind of theater that took place in real rather than staged settings, structured like an assemblage with many parts happening simultaneously. Often non-sequential, multi-focused, and open-ended, with less distinction between audience and performers

What is the probable intention of Peter Saul's painting, Saigon?

A savage indictment of American policy and behavior in Vietnam

According to the textbook, what is assemblage?

A term coined by Jean Dubuffet to refer to works that went beyond the pasted collages of the cubists

Guardians of the Secret

Abstract, action painting done by Pollock- cave paintings, petrogliphs, totems, and a coyote.

Number 1

Abstract, action painting done by pollock. Trace or index: mark of the artist's hand. You can follow what happened where and when.

What is all over composition?

An evenly dispersed composition with no focal point and forms or gestural marks covering the entire space of the canvas evenly

Oldenburg, Lipstick on caterpillar treads

An unsolicited "gift" to Yale, this work made a sarcastic equivalence between cosmetics/femininity and bullets/masculinity as a way of questioning the Vietnam war

What is the meaning of Arshile Gorky's name?

Arshile - Achilles and Gorky- bitter. Means the Bitter Achilles

Greenberg's view on art

Art is a painting, purity, more selective

How does Kaprow see the influence of Pollock on the next generation of artists?

Artists will focus on the space and objects of their everyday lives and use those as the materials for the new art, which will transcend the boundaries between art forms

Mexican Muralists

At the end of the Revolution the government commissioned artists to create art that could educate the mostly illiterate masses about Mexican history. Often painted political statements that had social relevance

sublime

Awe inspiring- we are so small, nature is large. Vastness of nature, human's insignificance in comparison to nature. Small person compared to a vast ocean or to the grand canyon.

Pollock's view on art

Believed that everything can be a material for art, everything is art.

What is a key characteristic of Minimalist art?

Blank, neutral mechanical impersonality that was overtly unsymbolic

What similarities did Navarjo sand painters and pollock have?

Both of the artists used a style that had the floor painting.

What similarities are there between Mark Rothko's work and Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd?

Both were for forms that destroyed illusion and revealed truth

Rauschenberg, Odalisk

Chicken "cock" on top. Promiscuous- wide ranging,, covered with erotic images Sexual reference - lamp can literally be turned on. Same symbolism used in advertising in society

What importance did Clement Greenberg give to color?

Color is optical and therefore belongs to painting; color in sculpture is therefore retrogressive

What type of forms are most common in Minimalist works?

Cube and grid forms that are regular and repeated, with few or no marks of the artist's hand

European artists experience in the United States

European artists disappointed that New York does not have the same cafe scene that was found at home in Europe. The cafe scene was where the Europeans socialized and would talk about art with one another for hours

Young American artists of the New York School shared these influences and characteristics

Experimentation with the formal vocabulary of European modernism, The imperative of social relevance, An interest in the unconscious mind, A radically individual style and approach, An interest in indigenous symbolism, and Existentialism

Newman placed his zips on the canvases at random intervals, preferring the composition to be guided by chance similar to the Dadaists' philosophy

False

Cage, 4'33"

Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of nothing but silence. Sound space, inspired by Rauschenberg's "White paintings". Said that noise has pitch, while silence only has duration.

Where might Rauschenberg's interest in erotic overtones and subliminal messages have come from?

From the prevalence of media and advertising in everyday life, and his reading of Marshall McLuhan's book the Mechanical Bride

Why did Clement Greenberg criticize de Kooning?

Greenberg thought that de Kooning's refusal to reject subject matter and paint only abstractions made him old-fashioned and not avant-garde

What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event...A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist

Harold Rosenberg

How did Arshile Gorky handle subject matter?

He began with an idea of what emotional and biographical subjects he wanted to paint and then disguised the figures and objects through techniques of automatism

What interested Dan Flavin about the fluorescent light tubes he used to create his sculptures?

He saw light as defining space rather than form, making the works interdependent with their surrounding environments

How did Willem de Kooning approach painting?

He was legendary for his inability to "finish" a painting, and often worked and reworked canvases obsessively, creating multi-layered images

Why might Claes Oldenburg have included sexual references and double-entendres in his large sculptures of consumer goods and food?

His reading of Freud, interest in surrealism, and statement that "if form in nature analyzes down to geometry, content analyzes down to erotic form"

What was Diego Rivera's influence on Pollock and other young abstract artists?

His scale, multi-layered content, and desire to create an indigenously "American" art influenced young artists

What is a combine?

His term for the arrangement of miscellaneous objects and materials, that often combined painting and sculpture

Semiotics

How language creates meaning

What was Nam June Paik trying to do with works like TV Bra for Living Sculpture?

Humanize the experience of technology

Fluxus

International movement centered in Europe that emphasizes every day objects in art. Partially created by the artist, completed by the viewer. Much simpler to interpret by the audience than the happening.

Romanticism

Involves faith in progress and chaos. emphasis on the inspired individual in some special contact with nature or the cosmos.

In what way is the art piece John with Art, by Arneston satirical of Abstract Expressionism?

It aims a vulgar satire at the abstract expressionist aspiration of letting everything within the artist spill out freely in the work

What effect did Jungian analysis have on Pollock's art?

It encouraged his search for totemic or mythic images with universal, unconscious meanings

Which of the following does Fineberg claim about Barnett Newman's painting Onement 1

It is an abstract representation of the creation of Adam, the first man, from clay, The title is a reference to Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement, The painting is influenced by Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, The symmetry stands for perfection in man's oneness with the all of God, It is an act of creation and division similar to the creation of the world from chaos

How does Greenberg see the evolution of painting?

It is getting more and more "purified" by losing all that it shared with other art forms such as sculpture or theater

What effect did the support and stipend paid by the WPA during the Depression have on young artists in the 1930s?

It offered artists dignity, a sense of value, and a place in American society

How did the art of Jasper Johns call assumptions about the content of art into question?

It questioned the romantic assumption that meaningful subject matter emanates from the individual, instead using painting to comment on itself, language, and meaning making

Pollock's legacy to subsequent artists is profound but often not readily visible...Pollock's radical reorientation of time in painting-his concentration on the instant at which the paint hit the canvas, purging references to past time or previous painting--was the central inspiration [that other artists took]

Jonathan Fineberg

He created some magnificent paintings. But he also destroyed painting.

Kaprow

What is kitsch art?

Kitsch is sometimes used to refer to virtually any form of popular art or mass entertainment, especially when sentimental, but, although many popular art forms are cheap and somewhat crude, they are at least direct and unpretentious

Little big painting is an example of what?

Lichtenstein painted this as a parody of abstract expressionism

In what way could New York School artists like Pollock and de Kooning be considered existentialist?

Like Sartre, they believed that action was the means of knowing themselves in relation to the world, and saw every aspect of constructing a painting as a meaningful gesture inseperable from the artist's biography

Surrealism

Looked to the unconscious mind as the source of Artistic subject matter. The real functioning of the mind

Automatism

New York school viewed it as a technique for generating form that did not impose style. It could express the creative force of what they believed was the unconscious in art. Automatism was the cornerstone of Surrealism.

Zip painting

Newman's style of painting where he would lay down a strip of masking tape, paint over the tape, and then peel off the tape.

Did Clement Greenberg like Minimalism?

No because he felt it was "too contrived", too unnatural, which kind of contradicts his earlier writing!

Rothko Number 14

Not figurative at all, very abstract. When you stand up you see nothing but color. The color field is more important subject matter.

What is Gorky's art style?

Notorious for stealing other people's style. His style has lots of different interpretations and no one will ever know the true meaning

Woman 1

One of de Kooning's trend of "monstrous females" . The woman depicted in Woman I is wholly unlike anything seen in Western painting - she is highly aggressive, erotic and threatening. Her frightening teeth and fierce eyes are not those of a stereotypically submissive, Cold war-era housewife, and de Kooning created her in part as a response to the idealized women in art history. the work is an important step in de Kooning's lifelong exploration of the relationship between figure and ground

Battle of the fishes

Painted by Masson- he just drew/scribbled without control, then looked at what it looked like, and then he added detail. This painting is an example of surrealism.

What word could be used to describe the layered semi obscured approach de Kooning used?

Palimpsest

Guernica

Picasso addresses the current event, political theme of the Spanish civil war. It connected with younger painters because it combined a powerful political statement- social relevance. This picture represents the terror, fear, and injustice of the bombing of the city of Guernica. The leader betrayed the city by allowing the city to get bombed

What was different about Picasso's political paintings than of the political paintings of other artists?

Picasso's connection to political themes are less documented than other artists. His paintings are more cartoon-like, you don't know what is going on compared to the political themes of other artists. With other artists you know exactly what event is happening, you can even recognize the faces of those in the painting

How was Pollock's death symbolic for Allan Kaprow?

Pollock did not die at the top, but after a depressing decline, much like the state of the art world as Kaprow saw it

What trio of subjects best represents Warhol's relationship with consumer culture?

Product, Disaster, Celebrity

What did Tony Smith say about the size of the work, Die?

Q: Why didn't you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer? A: I was not making a monument. Q: Then why didn't you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top? A: I was not making an object.

Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning

Rauschenberg asked for a painting that "would be missed", meaning that it was one of de Kooning's decent art pieces. Make nothing out of something. Aggressive act to possibly rebel against art - similar to Duchamp's "The fountain"

Johns, Three flags

Repetition of the flag makes it feel mass produced, which means that patriotism can be massed produced. Possibly hinting that it is less precious since we have more of it?

What was Arshile Gorky's early life like?

Short stretches of idyllic contentment in the midst of a terrible genocide and intense physical and emotional pain

What connotations did the term "funk art" have?

Something visceral and earthy, often so powerful and primitive as to threaten "good taste." An example CHILD by Conner

Why did Rothko give up making paintings with figures or subject matter in the late 1940s

Subject matter creates specific or "finite" associations and Rothko wanted to approach universals

abstract expressionist

Term for Kandinsky and other Europeans who painted abstractly with expressionist brushwork. Emphatically American in spirit - monumental in scale, romantic in mood, and expressive of a rugged individual freedom.

What was the difference in the use of automatism between the Surrealists and the New York School?

The Surrealists used automatism to reveal content, while the New York School used it as a method of generating form, in effort to record the spontaneity of unconscious thought

What does Kaprow identify as the accomplishments and gifts Pollock left?

The act of painting, the new space, the personal mark that builds its own form and meaning, the endless tangle, the great scale, the new materials

In what way is Jasper John's painting, False Start, concerned with semiotics?

The contradictions and confusion between color, label, and color of the label make the viewer question how language functions, and which aspect should be given primacy--the distance between what one knows and what one sees

How did Greenberg and his followers see John Cage, Rober Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, and Pop art?

The corrupting Anti-Christs of kitsch

Were the artists of the New York School all alike?

The only thing on which they could agree was that there was nothing on which they all could agree

What is the most important concept for understanding Barnett Newman's paintings?

The sublime

How is the work of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp similar?

They both regarded the everyday world as the source of art and rejected expressionism

How is the work of Warhol and Lichtenstein similar?

They both use technologies of mass production to emphasize new relationships between consumers and producers, and embrace "lowbrow" culture

How are Stella's works such as The Marriage of Reason and Squalor related to Jasper Johns' ideas?

They explore repetition and flatness, eliminating foreground and background by painting a single motif identical with the form of the canvas

Why were the artists of the New York School also called Abstract Expressionists?

They painted abstract yet emotionally expressive works that seemed to be in the tradition of Kandinsky, an Expressionist from the previous generation

What effect did European artist émigres have on the American artists in New York?

They provided a compelling new model of what an artist was, in their belief that art and life were inseparable

How were Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings similar to John Cage's compositions?

They redirected the viewer's attention from the psyche of the artist onto the outside world, providing a neutral backdrop for shadows and the colors of the environment the same way that Cage provided a backdrop for sounds

What was similar about the subjects of Neo-Dada and Pop art?

They were everyday subjects that people encountered in ordinary life, such as advertising and other images from the media

Garden in Sochi

This painting done by Gorky is a blend of different influences- primarily with Miro. The garden represents the one by his dad's garden by his farm. depicted motifs, including women rubbing their breasts on rocks to see their wishes fulfilled, and the "Holy Tree" with torn bits of clothing from persons visiting the tree

Regonalism

This type of painting asks "What makes America, American?" or What defines American masculinity? The art of the west painting by Benton is an example of this painting

Art of the West

This was a regionalism painting done by Benton. This painting showed the masculinity of America

What is the essence of Warhol's genius, according to Louis Menand and Ms. Koblik?

To remove what most people would agree was the essential aspects of a thing and to demonstrate that it made no difference in people's perceptions

What kind of persona did Jackson Pollock seek to present?

Tough and macho, with solidarity to blue collar laborers and a frontier independence

Jackson Pollock's paintings were influenced by the Jungian psychoanalysis he was undergoing.

True

Rauschenberg , White painting

Turning the attention away from the painting. The art is so simple, attention goes throughout the room. All you see is the shadow of yourself, focus less on the interior and more on the exterior.

How is the viewer meant to relate to Carl Andre's works such as Steel Magnesium Plain?

Walk on top of them and be literally in the space of the art. Andre abandoned carving and the assemblage of found materials in favor of arranging his sculptures from modular units.

Excavation

de Kooning's most sophisticated work. the main goal of challenging the viewer's mind. No scale within the painting is used. Mental map of an interlocking chain of thoughts and experiences overtime

Abstract art

does not depict a person, place or thing in the natural world - even in an extremely distorted or exaggerated way. Therefore, the subject of the work is based on what you see: color, shapes, brushstrokes, size, scale and, in some cases, the process

modernism

embraces the industrial age. Centers on a faith on the ability of human beings to examine and reshape the world around them using scientific knowledge, technology, and the power of reason. Action painting is the chaos of modern life. Autonomous work of art is the signature of modernism - self criticism and self examination.

Gestural painting

emphasizes the process of making art, often through a variety of techniques that include dripping, dabbing, smearing, and even flinging paint on to the surface of the canvas. Also called action painting

Avant-garde

ideas not only differ from what the rest of the society believes, but that they are closer to the "truth" around the world. New and unusual or experimental ideas

New York School

informal group of American artists. After the European artists came to New York, the school became known for its "melting pot" of art ideas and concepts.

Cubism

modern art's most radical break with traditional models of representation. It abandoned perspective, which artists had used to order space since the Renaissance. And it turned away from the realistic modeling of figures and towards a system of representing bodies in space that employed small, tilted planes, set in a shallow space.

What aspects of painting were eliminated with the transition from the Renaissance to Pollock?

objects, narrative, shapes and forms.

Existentialism

reject the idea and term that you belong to any school of thought. Emphasizes the existence of the individual in relation to the world

What are the "norms" of painting according to Clement Greenberg? Select all that apply

the enclosing shape or frame, value and color contrast, paint texture, and flatness