Art History

Postmodernism

- Sense of rupture - A response to WWII; Maybe the newer isn't better. Great sense of uncertainty, and a reaction against a scientific explanation, but instead that there is no objective reality. - The idea of meta-narrative is pushed against, recognizing that this uncertainty can be healthy. - Focus on individual subjectivity

Romanticism

1800-1850, - Partly reaction to Industrial revolution - Validates emotion in new forms - horror, terror - aesthetic but not beautiful. German and English: mostly nature Spanish: mostly political

Die Brücke

1st major avante-garde movement to have maifesto Free from reason and oppression. - Developing the modern example of expressive colorists like Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Henri Matisse, sharp and sometimes violently clashing colors are often used in Die Brücke painting to jolt the viewer into the experience of a particular emotion. - They stressed the value of youth and intuition in escaping the intellectual cul-de-sac of academic thought focused on copying earlier models. -Progenitors of the movement later known as German Expressionism, Die Brücke formed in Dresden in 1905 as a bohemian collective of artists in staunch opposition to the older, established bourgeois social order of Germany. Their art confronted feelings of alienation from the modern world by reaching back to pre-academic forms of expression including woodcut prints, carved wooden sculptures, and "primitive" modes of painting. This quest for authentic emotion led to an expressive style characterized by heightened color and a direct, simplified approach to form.

Dada

A different response to modern industrialism/war - etc. Not abstraction. Dada was an artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. It arose as a reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. Holds up in value - nonsense. This is not just visual but also literary, public performance and music. Art was meant to generate difficult questions about society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art. - Dada artists are known for their use of readymade objects - everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The use of the readymade forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society. - So intent were members of Dada on opposing all norms of bourgeois culture that the group was barely in favor of itself: "Dada is anti-Dada," they often cried. The group's founding in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich was appropriate: the Cabaret was named after the eighteenth century French satirist, Voltaire, whose novella Candide mocked the idiocies of his society. As Hugo Ball, one of the founders of both the Cabaret and Dada wrote, "This is our Candide against the times."

Feminism

A slippery term - Dr. Weichbrodt defines as: Movement in 1970s (primarily US) consciously influenced by 1st wave of feminism (more legal equality). This movement however was more interested in social equality.

Cubism

Analytic: Deconstruction of things - nothing emotional but factual statements Synthetic: Takes things in original contexts and makes new meaning with them.

Neo-Dada

Artwork that is critical of autonomy - art should be an integration of the artist. Art is abstract but still symbolic.

Still life with basket of Apples

Cezanne, 1890-94, Post-Impressionism 1) Not seamless, trying to acurately experience reality 2) Also asking why does a painting have to have to capture a single moment? Why can't it show the passage of time? 3) Wonky perspective

Running Fence

Christo & Jeanne Claude, 1972-76, Post-Modernism 1) Opposite of autonomous art - site specific 2) Purpose: create marks of joy and beauty to see something familiar in a new way. 3) Even if its just temporary they still did it - 9 lawyers, 200,000 square ft. of fabric, 4 years - only stayed up for 14 days.

Boulevard des Capucines

Claude Monet, 1873, Impressionism 1)Boulevard des Capucines presented a genuine glimpse of Parisian life on a winter day, and the critic Ernest Chesneau claimed that Monet captured the elusive quality of movement with unprecedented skill. 2)The painting captures a scene of the hustle and bustle of Parisian life from the studio of Monet's friend, the photographer Felix Nadar. Applying very little detail, Monet uses short, quick brushstrokes to create the "impression" of people in the city alive with movement. 3) Fragmentation is also created by the double perspective thrust formed by the apartment blocks on the left and by the line of wintry trees and snow-topped cabs in the middle of the composition.

Conceptual-ism

Conceptual art is a movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of art works. An amalgam of various tendencies rather than a tightly cohesive movement, Conceptualism took myriad forms, such as performances, happenings, and ephemera. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s Conceptual artists produced works and writings that completely rejected standard ideas of art. Their chief claim - that the articulation of an artistic idea suffices as a work of art - implied that concerns such as aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant standards by which art was usually judged.

Conceptualism

Conceptual art is a movement that prizes ideas over the formal or visual components of art works. An amalgam of various tendencies rather than a tightly cohesive movement, Conceptualism took myriad forms, such as performances, happenings, and ephemera. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s Conceptual artists produced works and writings that completely rejected standard ideas of art. Their chief claim - that the articulation of an artistic idea suffices as a work of art - implied that concerns such as aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant standards by which art was usually judged.

The persistence of Memory

Dali, 1931, Surrealism 1) Dali wanted to dig into the sub-conscience, he was painting not a physical landscape but a psychological one. 2) He presents things that are unbelievable in a way that is believable - through hyper realism 3) Dali wants to remind you of your suppressed desires etc - all the ways that rationality is holding you back.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Damien Hurst, 1991, Post-Modernism 1) Super-gutzy: He really has no hands in actually making this - he just organizes it. 2) He goes to extreme lengths to do this - hires Australian fisherman, chemists, engineers. Critics say that "anyone could do this." Hurst replies "but they don't" 3) Art that can move you - probes the viewer to recognize their own fragility and mortality.

Fountain

Duchamp, 1917, Dada 1) Critical of academy's art, what is it that makes something art? 2) Starts to make ready-mades. "I'm an artist, therefore it art." 3) Also wants to bring attention to value the new industrial forms of the age; he wants those to be forms.

De Stijl

Dutch avant-garde movement "The Style" Singular movement. - Eliminates the subjective elements: uses restrictive vocabulary, trying to create a "dynamic equilibrium." - Something very stable but with energy. - Utopian Reasons: Believed they could create a common denominator of architecture and art through planes and lines.

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

Edgar Degas, 1880, Impressionism 1)The sculpture was not so warmly received when she first appeared. The critics protested almost unanimously that she was ugly, but had to acknowledge the work's astonishing realism as well as its revolutionary nature. 2) The mixed media of the Little Dancer, basically a wax statuette dressed in real clothes, was very innovative, most of all because she was considered a modern subject—a student dancer of the Paris Opera Ballet. 3) t the derogatory association of the name with dirt and poverty was also intentional. Young, pretty, and poor, the ballet students also were potential targets of male "protectors." Degas understood the predicament of the Little Dancer—what the contemporary reviewer Joris-Karl Huysmans called her "terrible reality."

Spirit of the Dead Watching

Gaugin, 1892, Post Impressionism 1) Gaugin's experiences in the islands - he is looking to gain some spiritual experience/divine experience through painting/having real this young girl who is primal/native. 2) Playing off Olympia - appropiating their culture - he thinks of them as lesser people because they are "primitive"

Der Blave Reiter

German Expression : Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, Gabriele Münter, Lyonel Feininger, Albert Bloch and others formed the group in response to the rejection of Kandinsky's painting Last Judgment from an exhibition. Der Blaue Reiter lacked an artistic manifesto, but it was centered on Kandinsky and Marc. -Der Blaue Reiter painting was structured around an idea that color and form carried concrete spiritual values. Thus, the move into abstraction resulted partly from radically separating form and color into discrete elements within a painting or applying non-naturalistic color to recognizable objects. - One of the two pioneering movements of German Expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter began in Munich as an abstract counterpart to Die Brücke's distorted figurative style. While both confronted feelings of alienation within an increasingly modernizing world, Der Blaue Reiter sought to transcend the mundane by pursuing the spiritual value of art.

Autumn Rhythm

Jackson Pollock, 1950, Abstract Expressionism 1) Interested in the universal paintings; something primal and that everyone could relate to. 2) A rejection of past "rules" of painting/art: No subject, no focal point, even the Process is new and different. 3) Huge painting - wants to fill your vision

The Dinner Party

Judy Chicago, 1974-79, Feminist Art Movement 1) Huge instillation - 39 place settings, each commemorating important women in history, although not all are real women. 2) Does 3 things: Finds women lost to history and elevating them, shows that craft is still art, elevates the female body through making known the void in our body and how that void is powerful. 3) Sculptures that resemble vaginas/women's genitalia - point to being full of potential/power

Street, Dresden

Kirchner, 1908, Die Brucke 1)The crowded city street—here, Dresden's fashionable Königstrasse—was a frequent subject for the German Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge), an art collective Kirchner helped found in 1905. The group sought an authenticity of expression that its members felt had been lost with the innovations of modern life. 2) Kirchner has violently heightened the colors of this urban scene, depicting its figures with masklike faces and vacant eyes in an attempt to capture the psychological alienation wrought by modernization. 3)

Whaam!

Lichtensteinn, 1963, Pop 1) Simplified story telling 2) History paintings used backgrounds to tell history - why not use these new forms of pop culture to do the same thing? 3) Why is this kind of art considered "low art"?

Regionalism

Literary and visual arts movement that focused on the "true American spirit" - farmland of the Mid-West. Mimics how Dutch landscape found their identity in the landscape.

Black Arts Movement

Loose collection of artists - cultural aim of the black power movement was to present art about and FOR other black people. Goal wasn't to impress white people.

Olympia

Manet, 1863, Realism 1) Audience isn't ready for this type of social push. Social codes are being blurred - who is she? 2) Contextualized in a way - "mammy" figure in background, dirty feet, direct gaze, clothing etc. - is she a prostitute? 3) He starts to move away from the illusion - the painting is so sexually charged that it becomes undesirable. 4) Manet wants to be a rebel but also wants affirmation. The Salon is undergoing change.

The Joy of Life

Matisse, 1905-6, Fauvism 1) Represents an ideal; What Matisse wishes society could be like. 2) He is attempting to free color - it does not have to be representative of it's actual nature. 3) Still pointing back to history; many of the figures have poses that point back to previous art works. Also points back at The Garden of Earthly delights.

Impressionism

Now is the kind of art in museum giftshop, but then would have been radical and even offensive. a style or movement in painting originating in France in the 1860s, characterized by a concern with depicting the visual impression of the moment, especially in terms of the shifting effect of light and color. a literary or artistic style that seeks to capture a feeling or experience rather than to achieve accurate depiction. MUSIC a style of composition (associated especially with Debussy) in which clarity of structure and theme is subordinate to harmonic effects, characteristically using the whole-tone scale

Les Demoiselles D'Avignon

Picasso, 1907, Cubism 1) Points back at African/primal art in the two mask like faces. "Unlike most Europeans, however, Picasso saw this savagery as a source of vitality and renewal that he wanted to incorporate for himself and for European painting. His interpretation of African art, in these mask-like faces, was based on this idea of African savagery; his brush-strokes are hacking, impetuous, and violent." 2) Picasso turns his back on middle-class society and the traditional values of the time, opting for the sexual freedom depicted in a brothel. 3) He also rejects popular current movements in painting by choosing line drawing rather than the color- and light-defined forms of Impressionism and the Fauves. The painter's private demons take shape in the figures on the canvas.

Bottle of Suze

Picasso, 1912, Cubism (synthetic) 1) Uses Newspaper - visually is graphic and ties in painting contextually 2)Serving as a formal element, the newsprint also suggests the popular Parisian café activity of reading the paper while smoking and drinking. The texts add a political and social dimension to the image: they juxtapose newspaper articles referring to horrific events from the First Balkan war with stories of Parisian frivolity. 3) Along with the texts, the distorted, fragmented forms in this Cubist image allude to such conditions of modernity as the lack of coherent perspectives or meanings in a constantly changing world. Picasso's work can thus be seen as simultaneously warning against the absurdity of modern life while also delighting in life's simple pleasures.

Pop

Pop art started with the New York artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Claes Oldenburg, all of whom drew on popular imagery and were actually part of an international phenomenon. Following the popularity of the Abstract Expressionists, Pop's reintroduction of identifiable imagery (drawn from mass media and popular culture) was a major shift for the direction of modernism. The subject matter became far from traditional "high art" themes of morality, mythology, and classic history; rather, Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art. Perhaps owing to the incorporation of commercial images, Pop art has become one of the most recognizable styles of modern art.

Bed

Rauschenberg, 1955, Neo-Dada, Proto-pop 1) Artist calls this a combine (3D collage) He is poking fun at academic "rules" of painting. "Why does a painting have to be flat?" 2) Neo-Dada is the sense that he is not problem solving but is dissecting these rules 3) Makes use of readymades - a quilt and pillow that he bought. 4) The splatters are poking fun at expressionist or impressionist artists (more in a playful way than angry or spiteful though)

Surrealism

Response to WW1, develops in Paris - Digs into the subjective - Belief in truth beyond - Art about the unconsciousness, but looks believable through hyper-realism. Reminds you of your conscious and your suppressed desires - all the ways rationality is holding you back.

Schröder House

Rietvald, 1924, De Stijl 1) Distijl architecture: Democratic architecture 2) Emphasis on harmony 3) Response to WW2 and it's chaos 4) Precursor to IKEA-wanted to make something that everyone could construct - what is the best design?

Patchwork Quilt

Romare Bearden, 1970, Black Arts Movement 1) Interested in trying to create a distinct black aesthetic: using visual language that relates 2) Reference to Venus and to Egypt - "Hey whte Americans - don't forget that great civilization was in Africa." 3) Flat stylization makes it hard to easity consume or to objectify.

A Sunday Afternoon On the Island of La Grande Jatte

Seurat, 1884-86, Post-Impressionism 1) Took a more scientific approach to painting. Understood how our eye works and how it would blend for us. 2) Seurat sometimes called a divitionist or pointillist. He layered many many dots next to each other, he did not blend them. 3) Elements of tradition - Uses profile, static, archaic, Greek. Also the size of it points back at history - this painting is enormous - he wanted to capture the viewer's entire attention.

The Hairdresser's Window

Slaon, 1907, Ashcan School 1) Rejecting American painting: naturalistic in a way that shows everyday subject matter 2) Portrays the different social classes in one picture - how the world is changing 3) Irish-hair: not treated well - Sloan may be commenting on what society is doing. 4) The name "Ashcan" comes from a critique that his paintings had ash in them because of it's color

Neo - Dada

The term Neo-Dada was applied to the works of artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allan Kaprow who initiated a radical shift in the focus of modern art during the 1950s. Neo-Dada artists are known for their usage of mass media and found objects, as well as a penchant for performance. These artists rebelled against the emotionally charged paintings of the Abstract Expressionists that dominated the art world in the 1950s. By introducing mundane subject and emphasizing performance, the Neo-Dada artists ushered in the radical changes modern art underwent during the 1960s and paved the way for Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism.

The Oxbow

Thomas Cole, 1836, Hudson River School 1) Wants to emphasize the American landscape and it's identity. 2) In this you see both agrarian land (Jefferson) and industrialization (Jacksonian). He is making the point that we need both. This is not just landscape but also political. 3) He paints himself in the piece, among the wilderness - points back to the sublime.

Raft of Medusa

Théodore Géricault, 1818-19, Romanticism 1) Like Goya this is a social critique 2) Introduces a sense of journalism and investigation. 3) The artist actually reconstructs a raft and studies dead bodies - bringing in limbs and heads from morgue into studio. He uses very classical poses - romanticism is not necessarily at odds with classicism. 4) He was trying to get an emotional rise.

The Night Cafe

Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, Post-Impressionism 1)The harsh colors and disorienting perspective reflect the overall sadness, bitterness, and loneliness, of those in the room. 2) "It is color not locally true from the point of view of the stereoscopic realist, but color to suggest the emotion of an ardent temperament." 3)

Composition VII

Wassily Kandinsky, 1913, Der Blave Reiter 1)rejection of pictorial representation through a swirling hurricane of colors and shapes. 2) The operatic and tumultuous roiling of forms around the canvas exemplifies Kandinsky's belief that painting could evoke sounds the way music called to mind certain colors and forms. Even the title, Composition VII, aligned with his interest in the intertwining of the musical with the visual and emphasized Kandinsky's non-representational focus in this work. 3)In 1911 Kandinsky played a central role in organizing Der Blaue Reiter, a group of artists named in part after Kandinsky's favorite color, blue.

Abstract Expressionism

a development of abstract art that originated in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and aimed at subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the creative spontaneous act (e.g., action painting). Leading figures were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Post Impressionism

a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Due to its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content, Post-Impressionism encompasses Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work.

Fauvism

the first twentieth-century movement in modern art, was initially inspired by the examples of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. Matisse emerged as the leader of the group, whose members shared the use of intense color as a vehicle for describing light and space, and who redefined pure color and form as means of communicating the artist's emotional state. In these regards, Fauvism proved to be an important precursor to Cubism and Expressionism as well as a touchstone for future modes of abstraction. - Major themes of this ism was to free color and composition from its descriptive, representational purpose and allowing it to exist on the canvas as an independent element. - Above all, Fauvism valued individual expression. The artist's direct experience of his subjects, his emotional response to nature, and his intuition were all more important than academic theory or elevated subject matter. All elements of painting were employed in service of this goal.