From Mona Lisa to Modernism Exam V

Marcel Duchamp, The Fountain, 1917

- Dada Movement - "readymade" sculptures, which were mass-produced common objects—"found objects" the artist selected and sometimes "rectified" by modifying their substance or combining them with another object. - readymades, Duchamp insisted, was free from any consideration of either good or bad taste, qualities shaped by a society that he and other Dada artists found aesthetically bankrupt - he did not select the urinal for exhibition because of its aesthetic qualities. The "art" of this "artwork" lay in the artist's choice of object, which had the effect of conferring the status of art on it and forcing viewers to see the object in a new light - Duchamp set in motion philosophical debates about what constitutes art that continue today

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979

- Feminist Art - artist wanted to symbolize women's achievements had been left out of history - artist thought about the piece as a reinterpretation of the Last Supper from the point of view of women, who, throughout history, had prepared the meals and set the table. - women representation in the form of plates set on the table would express the way women had been confined, and the piece would thus reflect both women's achievements and their oppression - to forge a new kind of art expressing women's experience - rests on a triangular white tile floor inscribed with the names of 999 additional women of achievement to signify that the accomplishments of the 39 honored guests rest on a foundation other women had laid - Each woman's place has identical eating utensils and a goblet, but features a unique oversized porcelain plate and a long place mat or table runner covered with imagery reflecting significant facts about that woman's life and culture. - The designs on each plate incorporate both butterfly and vulval motifs—the butterfly as the ancient symbol of liberation and the vulva as the symbol of female sexuality.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-1904

- His aim was not truth in appearance, especially not photographic truth, nor was it the "truth" of Impressionism - he sought a lasting structure behind the formless and fleeting visual information that the eyes absorb - His goal was to order the lines, planes, and colors of nature - He sought to achieve Poussin's effects of distance, depth, structure, and solidity, not by using traditional perspective and chiaroscuro, but rather by recording the color patterns he deduced from an optical analysis of nature. - To create the illusion of three-dimensional form and space, Cézanne focused on carefully selecting colors - Cézanne's rendition of nature approximates the experience a person has when viewing the forms of nature from multiple viewpoints

Picasso, Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

- Modernism - Picasso had become wholly absorbed in the problem of finding a new way to represent the five women in their interior space - Instead of depicting the figures as continuous volumes, he fractured their shapes and interwove them with the equally jagged planes representing drapery and empty space - the energetic, violently striated features of the heads of the two women at the right emerged late in Picasso's production of the work and grew directly from his increasing fascination with African sculpture - He broke them into more ambiguous planes suggesting a combination of views, as if the observer were seeing the figures from more than one place in space at once - was nothing less than a dramatic departure from and disruption of the Western pictorial tradition

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

- Post-Impressionism - consistent with his enduring religious fervor, he communicated his feelings about the electrifying vastness of the universe by filling the night sky with stars that whirl and explode above a church nestled in the center of a Provençal village - this work does correspond in many ways to the view available to the painter from the window of his room in the asylum - given van Gogh's determination to "use color . . . to express [him]self forcibly," the dark, deep blue suffusing the entire painting cannot be overlooked - with the turbulent brushstrokes, the color suggests a quiet but pervasive depression

Jacob Lawrence, The Great Migration Series, no. 49, 1940-1941

- The Migration series consists of 60 panels, all with explanatory captions - Lawrence's Migration paintings provide numerous vignettes capturing the experiences of the African Americans who had moved to the North. Often, a sense of the bleakness and degradation of their new life dominates the images - depicted a blatantly segregated dining room with a barrier running down the room's center separating the whites on the left from the African Americans on the right - interpreted his themes systematically in rhythmic arrangements of bold, flat, and strongly colored shapes. His style drew equally from his interest in the push-pull effects of Cubist space and his memories of the patterns made by the colored scatter rugs brightening the floors of his childhood homes.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950

- The artist whose work best exemplifies gestural abstraction - consist of rhythmic drips, splatters, and dribbles of paint - The mural-size fields of energetic skeins of pigment envelop viewers, drawing them into a lacy spider web - Using sticks or brushes, Pollock flung, poured, and dripped paint onto a section of canvas that he simply unrolled across his studio floor - This working method earned Pollock the nickname "Jack the Dripper" - Pollock created art that was spontaneous yet choreographed. His painting technique highlights the most significant aspect of gestural abstraction—its emphasis on the creative process.

Berthe Morisot, Summer's Day, 1879

- Woman Impressionist - brought a distinctively feminine viewpoint to their work, especially with regard to the subjects they chose and the way they portrayed women - he people who inhabit her canvases are almost exclusively women and their children, always well dressed and thoughtful, never frivolous or objects of male desire - Morisot herself is in the same boat, unseen, and she represented the women at a sharp angle, with parts of their bodies and most of the boat cut off by the frame - Morisot rejected contour lines in favor of patches of color that define the shapes of her figures - The sketchy brushstrokes used to paint the women merge with those of the water, unifying figure and ground in a striking two-dimensional composition that also captures all the freshness of a brightly lit summer day en plein air

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970

- a mammoth 1,500-foot-long coil of black basalt, limestone rocks, and earth curving out from the shoreline into the water - Smithson insisted on designing his work in response to the location itself. He wanted to avoid the arrogance of an artist merely imposing an unrelated concept on the site - The spiral idea grew from Smithson's first impression of the location. Then, while researching Great Salt Lake, Smithson discovered that the molecular structure of the salt crystals coating the rocks at the water's edge is spiral in form - The photographs and film have become increasingly important, because fluctuations in Great Salt Lake's water level often place Spiral Jetty underwater

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1929

- artist believed that the basic physical and psychological needs of every human being were sun, space, and vegetation combined with controlled temperature, good ventilation, and insulation against harmful and undesired noise - The country house, a place of retreat from the city for the wealthy businessman, sits at the center of a large plot of land cleared of trees and shrubs, but windows on all sides and the villa's roof terrace provided Savoye and his wife, Emilie, with broad views of the surrounding landscape - Much of the house's interior is open space, with thin columns supporting the main living floor and roof garden area - Strip windows running along the membranelike exterior walls provide illumination to the rooms as well as views out to nature - The Villa Savoye has no traditional facade. - paces and masses interpenetrate so fluidly that inside and outside spaces intermingle - intended to reverse the effect of traditional country houses

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930

- artist moved beyond Cubism because he felt that "Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing towards its own goal, the expression of pure plastics [that is, three-dimensional form] - Neoplasticism—the new "pure plastic art." He believed that all great art had polar but coexistent goals, the attempt to create "universal beauty" and the desire for "aesthetic expression of oneself." - Basing his ideas on a combination of teachings, he concluded that primary colors and values are the purest colors and therefore are the perfect tools to help an artist construct a harmonious composition - Mondrian worked to maintain what he called a "dynamic equilibrium" in his paintings by precisely determining the size and position of lines, shapes, and colors.

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893

- expressionism - the goal was to describe the conditions of "modern psychic life. - to achieve that goal, Realist and Impressionist techniques were inappropriate, focusing as they did on the tangible world - in the spirit of Symbolism, Munch used color, line, and figural distortion for expressive ends - inspiration for the painting came after Munch had experienced a fit of anxiety after walking, intoxicated, beside the Oslo fjord on a summer evening. however, his depiction of the scene departs significantly from visual reality. - evokes a powerful emotional response from the viewer because of the painter's dramatic presentation - The landscape's sweeping curvilinear lines reiterate the shapes of the man's mouth and head, almost like an echo, as the cry seems to reverberate through the setting - Appropriately, the original title of this work was Despair.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Poppy, 1927

- famous for painting flowers - give sense of life and personality of flower itself - abstracted portrait of flower - vivid bright colors - detailed and close look up of flowers, making them into an abstract organic form

Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), 1905-1906

- genre painting - using a format of landscape with nudes but is using colors that we don't associate with these landscape elements - abstracted flats - trees framing the composition - very stylized formed, not that many details - pastoral scene - figures enjoying themselves and relaxing in nature

Rodin, The Kiss, 1901-1904

- had many replicas - powerful youthful male and female figures - classical looking, inspiration from Michelangelo - shows erotic moment of kiss - Rodin thought the nude figure was the most truthful way to depict the human figure

Frank Lloyd Wright, Robie House, 1907-1909

- house that was the earliest in prairie style - house should adhere to this flatland and hug the land' - horizontal, based on the plot that's allotted - one several levels, overlapping horizontals, asymmetrical - lots of windows - very beautiful and detailed - emphasis on natural light in large living spaces, divided for different activities

Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876

- impressionist - artist believed art must be indescribable and it must be inimitable - artist wanted people to feel that neither the setting nor the figures are dull and lifeless - Renoir depicted throngs of ordinary working-class people gathered in the popular Parisian dance hall - So lively is the atmosphere that the viewer can virtually hear the sounds of music, laughter, and tinkling glasses - Renoir dappled the whole scene with sunlight and shade, artfully blurred into the figures to produce precisely the effect of floating and fleeting light that many Impressionists cultivated - The casual poses and asymmetrical placement of the figures and the suggested continuity of space, spreading in all directions and only accidentally limited by the frame, position the viewer as a participant rather than as an outsider - Several of artists friends posed for individual figures in the painting.

Monet, Saint-Lazare Train Station, 1877

- impressionist - depicts a characteristic aspect of the contemporary urban scene - Monet captured the energy and vitality of Paris's modern transportation hub - The train, emerging from the steam and smoke it emits, rumbles into the station. In the background haze are the tall buildings that were becoming a major component of the Parisian landscape - Monet's agitated paint application contributes to the sense of energy and conveys the atmosphere of urban life - As we look at this magnificent picture, we are overcome by the same feelings as if we were really there, and these feelings are perhaps even more powerful, because in the picture the artist has conveyed his own feelings as well

Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888

- impressionist - the painting shows Breton women, wearing their starched white Sunday caps and black dresses, visualizing the sermon they have just heard in church on Jacob's encounter with the Holy Spirit - Gauguin departed from optical realism and composed the picture elements to focus the viewer's attention on the idea and to intensify its message - Gauguin departed from optical realism and composed the picture elements to focus the viewer's attention on the idea and to intensify its message - he abstracted the scene into a pattern, with the tree symbolically dividing the spiritual from the earthly realm - Pure unmodulated color fills flat planes and shapes bounded by firm line: white caps, black dresses, and the red field of combat. - Gauguin admired Japanese prints and medieval cloisonné metalwork and stained glass - rejected objective representation in favor of subjective expression

Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of the Grand Jatte, 1884-1886

- impressionist and Pointillism/divisionism - artist divided colors into their component parts and applied those colors to the canvas in small dots, colors are placed closely to one another to create a shadowing and shading technique and sort of appear as a mixed color from the distance - forms are comprehendible only at a distance - very large - spent two years on it - took as subject a popular island outside Paris where elegant people went to on a Sunday afternoon, dressed up and on display for one another - mapped out on a sort of grid to bring the scene back into the distance to create a sense of space - gives a good idea of what clothes looked like at the time - everyone seems to be still, very uncanny - relaxed man looks out of place, not dressed up, more relaxed - a young girl is running breaks the stillness as well as the dogs in the foreground - a window into the leisure activities, but very static, showing that people are isolated from one another, reflecting on society - very simplified trees and figures - water slashes not dots - neo-impressionism, new way of impressionism

Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005

- set out to correct that discriminatory imbalance is Los Angeles native - based on Jacques-Louis David's painting - His trademark paintings, however, are reworkings of historically important portraits in which he substitutes figures of young black men in contemporary dress in order to situate them in what he calls "the field of power." - to evoke the era of the original, Wiley presented his portrait of an African American Napoleon on horseback in a gilt wood frame - Wiley's version is by no means a mechanical copy - His heroic narrative unfolds against a vibrantly colored ornate wallpaper-like background instead of a dramatic sky—a distinctly modernist reminder to the viewer that this is a painting and not a window onto an Alpine landscape.

Roy Lichtenstein, Hopeless, 1963

- the artist paints directly without perspective or shading - The influence of comic books is evident in Lichtenstein's mature work - Lichtenstein excerpted an image from a comic book, a form of entertainment meant to be read and discarded, and immortalized the image on a large canvas. - His subjects were typically the melodramatic scenes that were mainstays of romance comic books popular at the time and included "balloons" with the words the characters speak. - used the visual vocabulary of the comic strip, with its dark black outlines and unmodulated color areas, and retained the familiar square dimensions. - by emulating the printing technique called benday dots , he called attention to the mass-produced derivation of the image.

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939

- used the details of her life as powerful symbols for the psychological pain of human existence - The twin figures sit side by side on a low bench in a barren landscape under a stormy sky - The figures suggest different sides of the artist's personality, inextricably linked by the clasped hands and by the thin artery stretching between them, joining their exposed hearts - The artery ends on one side in surgical forceps and on the other in a miniature portrait of Rivera as a child. Her deeply personal paintings touch sensual and psychological memories in her audience. - incorporates Kahlo's commentary on the struggle facing Mexicans in the early 20th century in defining their national cultural identity - The Frida on the right (representing indigenous culture) appears in a Tehuana dress, the traditional costume of Zapotec women from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, whereas the Frida on the left (representing imperialist forces) wears a European-style white lace dress - The heart, depicted here in such dramatic fashion, was an important symbol in the art of the Aztecs, whom Mexican nationalists idealized as the last independent rulers of their land

The Guerrilla Girls, Untitled, 1985-1990

- women have to be naked to get into the MET - guerilla mask signature on top of the Grand Odalisque - taking nude image of woman and using it to reveal the plight of women in the museum world - many nude woman paintings are in museum's but women artists cant get into the museum

Impressionism

A late-19th-century art movement that sought to capture a fleeting moment, thereby conveying the elusiveness and impermanence of images and conditions.

Symbolism

A late-19th-century movement based on the idea that the artist was not an imitator of nature but a creator who transformed the facts of nature into a symbol of the inner experience of that fact.

The Bauhaus

A school of architecture in Germany in the 1920s under the aegis of Walter Gropius, who emphasized the unity of art, architecture, and design.

Pop Art

A term coined by British art critic Lawrence Alloway to refer to art, first appearing in the 1950s, that incorporated elements from consumer culture, the mass media, and popular culture, such as images from motion pictures and advertising.

Surrealism

An artistic movement that displayed vivid dream worlds and fantastic unreal images

Post-Impressionism

An artistic movement that expressed world that could not normally be seen, like dreams and fantasy.

Fauvism

An early-20th-century art movement led by Henri Matisse. For the Fauves, color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning.

Dada

An early-20th-century art movement prompted by a revulsion against the horror of World War I. Dada embraced political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. A disdain for convention, often enlivened by humor or whimsy, is characteristic of the art the Dadaists produced.

Cubism

An early-20th-century art movement that rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world

Site-specific

Art created for a specific location.

De Stijl

Dutch, "the style." An early-20th-century art movement (and magazine), founded by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Does-burg, whose members promoted utopian ideals and developed a simplified geometric style.

Abstract Expressionism

The first major American avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York City in the 1940s. The artists produced abstract paintings that expressed their state of mind and that they hoped would strike emotional chords in viewers. The movement developed along two lines: gestural abstraction and chromatic abstraction.

Feminist Art

is the art of the 70's which focused on the power that kept women in a subordinate place in society and the arts.

Pointillism/Divisionism

the application of pure color in small dots, allowing the eye to mix (such as red and blue dots side by side, which the eye sees as violet)