Chapter 24 Art History
Grant Wood
American Gothic This is an example of regionalism. This painting has become an American icon because the couple was seen as embodying strength, dignity, and integrity. People felt that Wood had captured the true spirit of America. Its popularity also reflects a rejection of pure abstraction art.
Diego Rivera
Ancient Mexico Rivera was committed to developing an art that served his people's needs. He wanted to create a national Mexican style that focused on Mexico's history and incorporated a popular, accessible aesthetic. We see scenes from Mexico's history that represent conflicts between the indigenous people and the Spanish colonizers.
Constantin Brancusi
Bird in Space This is the final product of a long process. It is an abstraction. It keeps the suggestion of a bird and captures the essence of flight.
Robert Delaunay
Chams de Mars (The Red Tower) It is an example of analytic cubism. The artist is analyzing form and breaking down pictorial elements in order to convey meaning- to present a different way of looking at objects. Here Delaunay broke the unity of the structure into a kaleidoscope. This painting could be seen as a political commentary on the collapse of order in the year before WWI.
William Van Alen
Chrysler Building This is art deco's masterpiece. It seems streamlined with elongated symmetry and simple flat shapes.
Jean Arp
Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance This is an example of Dada art. It shows how the Dada artists liked to use chance in making their images. Here Arp gave up artistic control which reinforced the main principles of Dadaism: anarchy and subversiveness.
Piet Mondrian
Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow This is an example of De Stijl painting. This work is also pure abstraction. It is created with primary colors, primary values, and primary directions.
Major Ideas Covered
Early 20th century art is characterized by the beginnings of abstraction. Early 20th century movements include: Fauvism, Cubism, Purism, Futurism, and Dada art. Picasso was one of the most important 20th century artists who pioneered new ways to depict forms in space. Early 20th century American artists were heavily influenced by European developments. Post-World War I European art was very expressionistic.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Fallingwater (Kaufmann House) It is a prime example of Wright's "naturalism." His use of the cantilever and the integration of landscaped house reached new heights here. This house is a testament to the ideal of living in harmony with nature AND a declaration of warfare on the modern industrial city.
Marcel Duchamp
Fountain This is an example of Dada art and a ready made sculpture. By designating this urinal (a found object) a work of art- he mocked conventional techniques of making art. Fountain wasn't art because Duchamp "made" it- but because he had removed it from the context of everyday life and had given it a whole new identity as art. This sculpture introduced to modern art the revolutionary notion that a work of art is first and foremost about an artist's idea.
Pablo Picasso
Gertrude Stein Picasso made momentous contributions to the development of abstract art. Here we can see Picasso is still wedded to more traditional modes of representation. He is closer here to his realist roots than his eventual Cubist style. This painting is important to look at because it gives us an idea of where Picasso came from
Surrealism
Goal of Surrealism: to bring the aspects of outer and inner reality together. Surrealism developed along 2 lines: abstract surrealism using psychic automatism and depicting biomorphic shapes, visionary surrealism. The fundamental paradox: Surrealist art rested on the artist's conscious effort to capture the subconscious.
Gunta Stolzl
Gobelin tapestry
Pablo Picasso
Guernica This painting was a political statement. It condemns an act of senseless violence- the destruction of Guernica. We see grief, destruction, and fragmentation throughout. In the act of painting them, Picasso has paralleled what happened to them in real life.
Marc Chagall
I and the Village This is an example of fantasy art. We also see elements of expressionism, cubism, and fauvism. It is an assortment of images from his memories of his homeland. It seems to be part of a dream world. Chagall uses symbols to suggest a broader human experience.
Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon This painting led to a radically new method of representing form in space. Instead of representing the figures as continuous volumes he broke up their shapes and interwove them with the equally jagged planes that represent drapery and empty space. Picasso "de-sexualized" these women. He forever changed the image of the alluring female nude from Western Art. This painting is a precursor to cubism and the beginning to abstraction.
Stuart Davis
Lucky Strike Stuart believed that he was creating a new modern American style. This is one of several tobacco still life he painted. Here he depicts the cigarette package in fragmented form- like the Synthetic Cubist collages. Stuart doesn't glue the printed elements on- they are illusionistically painted on the canvas.
Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother This is an example of documentary photography. Here Lange has depicted this woman as an unconquerable heroine. The image moves beyond a specific time and place to universalize the twin evils of poverty and oppression.
Edward Hopper
Nighthawks This is an example of regionalism and social realism. This painting shows the effects of the Great Depression and captures America's mood. It evokes the loneliness of modern people.
Marcel Duchamp
Nude Descending a Staircase Here we see elements of both Cubism and Futurism. It depicts a single figure in motion coming down a staircase in a time continuum which suggests the effect of a sequence of film still. This painting was not well received by critics or the public.
Meret Oppenheim
Object This is a Surrealist sculpture. It incorporates sensuality and eroticism (Surrealist elements) It is shocking because it irreverently combines familiar yet very different elements.
Joan Miro
Painting This is an example of abstract surrealism. Psychic automatism is used and biomorphic shapes are depicted. These images are spontaneous and intuitive expressions of the little understood, submerged unconscious part of life.
Henry Moore
Reclining Figure Like Brancusi- Moore also had a great love of nature and knowledge of organic forms and materials. He wanted to draw attention to the physical qualities of the material. Here he has abstracted the female form. The curves, hollows and contours suggest the landscape where he grew up in England. He uses an organic vocabulary.
Henri Matisse
Red Room This painting was completed after his Fauve period. The subject of the painting (a woman placing a fruit bowl on the table) is secondary in importance to the formal arrangement of the composition. The painting can be considered as several "movements" of a Symphony. Here Matisse harmonizes different formal modes within a static pictorial space- which is new in art.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Robie House This is an example of the Prairie style. It has an open plan for the interior. He has used the cantilever to emphasize the building's horizontality. It is abstract and dynamic.
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld
Schroder House This is an example of De Stijl architecture. It has an open plan and a close relationship to nature. There is a shifting quality on the inside and outside. It is like a 3D projection of a Mondrian painting.
Wilhelm Lehmbruck
Seated Youth Lehmbruck was a German artist who was affected deeply by the war and drawn to Expressionism. Lehmbruck is combining the expressive qualities of Maillol and Rodin here. This figure communicates by pose and gesture alone. The sculpture is expressing both the artist's increasing depression and the general feeling of people in Europe after WWI.
Walter Gropius
Shop Block Example of Bauhaus architecture. The skeleton is made of reinforced concrete. Glass surrounds entire building. It is very simple and followed all of Gropius's principles.
Kazimir Malevich
Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying Malevich developed an abstract style to convey that the supreme reality in the world is pure feeling- which attaches to no objects. This is an example of Supermatism. This is pure abstraction!
Fernand Leger
The City This is an example of Purism. We see both Purist and Cubist elements here. The artist is depicting the mechanical commotion of the city here.
Andre Derain
The Dance Derain was a Fauve who worked to use color to it's fullest potential. The perspective appears distorted and color defines the space. He indicated light and shadow not by the differences in value but by the contrasts of hue. Color expresses the picture's content.
Salvador Dali
The Persistence of Memory This painting displays the paranoiac-critical method. It is an example of visionary surrealism. We also see Dali's trompe l'oeil skills. Not one confirmed interpretation. It is a very bizarre painting.
Alfred Stieglitz
The Steerage Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession group. He believed in making only straight, unmanipulated photographs. He was attracted most of all to arrangements of form that stirred his deepest emotions. This scene fascinated him because of the mix of shapes and human activity.
Rene Magritte
The Treachery of Images It is a trompe l'oeil image. It is an example of visionary surrealism. It shows the danger of relying on rationality when looking at a surrealist work. This painting wreaks havoc on the viewer's reliance on the conscious and the rational.
Major Ideas Covered
The early mid 20th century saw the development of Surrealism and Fantasy art which relied on the subconscious and dreamworlds. This period also witnessed the first pure abstract art (The Utopian Styles) Natural and organic forms became an important part of the art of Frank Lloyd Wright, Brancusi, Moore, and Calder. Regionalists like Hopper and Wood expressed American moods and values of the early mid 20th century.
Pablo Picasso
Three Musicians This is a painted version of synthetic cubism- Picasso developed in the 1920s. Here Picasso constructed figures from simple flat shapes that interlock and interpenetrate.
Marcel Breuer
Tubular Chair
Paul Klee
Twittering Machine This is an example of fantasy art. Klee has created a dream world here. He has joined the ancient world of nature with the modern world of machines. He is subtly showing that we are beings trapped by the operation of the industrial society we either helped to create or maintain.
Umberto Boccioni
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space This is considered the definitive work of futurist sculpture. This is a near life size bronze statue that depicts the sensation of motion. The figure is expanded, interrupted and broken in plane and contour. It is symbolic of the dynamic quality of modern life.
Alexander Calder
Untitled This is an example of kinetic sculpture. When air currents activate the sculpture its patterns suggest clouds, leaves or weaves blown by the wind (natural shapes.) We can see the influence of Mondrian and Miro. The shapes here are either geometric or organic.
Le Corbusier
Villa Savoye This is International Style architecture. It is Le Corbusier's idea of the ideal dwelling. It is simple and consists of plain masses of ferroconcrete and ribbon windows. Much of the house's interior is open space. He reversed the effect of traditional country houses.
Ernst Barlach
War Monument This is a WWI memorial. We see a hauntingly symbolic figure suspended above a tomb inscribed with the dates 1914-1918 and later 1939-1945. It suggests a dying soul at the moment when it is about to awaken to everlasting life. Barlach is expressing the spiritual anguish that the disaster of war evokes and the release from that anguish through the hope of salvation.
Henri Matisse
Woman with the Hat Matisse is trying to develop further Seurat's pointillist technique by enlarging and broadening the individual strokes of pure color. Here we see the Fauve use of bright color. For Matisse and the Fauves color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning.
