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How art be made form a child’s perspective?

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How art be made form a child’s perspective?

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Materials: oil on canvas

Description: Dubuffet tried depicting Paris for a child’s perspective, mimicking the carefree strokes that he or she might have made.

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Description: The Walking Man II sculpture portrays an extremely thin person made of bronze walking, with long feet tied to the ground and an indistinguishable face. That is the entire sculpture, which can symbolize alienation and loneliness, feelings that became extremely prevalent after World War II.

Art Movement: Impressionism (known for expressing the world they lived in and their feelings about it)

Historical Context: After World War II, many people lost hope in the world and were less trustful of their governments and  public institutions, leading to the rise of Existentialism. This impacted Alberto Giacometti because The Walking Man II has themes of loneliness and humility.

- Kate, Petra, Lesley, Owen

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Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?

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Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?

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Materials: Collage

Description: An idealized modernized version of Adam and Eve. Many products and entertainment forms that had been popularized are featured in the piece.

Historical Context: Western consumerism was on a rise after the war. The West had soft power and exported its culture through consumer goods. The piece satirizes the rise of consumerism in the West that would soon be replicated in the East.

By Arielle, Orlando and Olivia

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Description:
Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.8 cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen). In this iconic collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton, created in 1956, a midcentury living room is filled to the brim with logos and cut-out images of consumer products.

Movement: Pop Art

Context: Following the victory of Allied forces in World War Two, the United States in particular experienced a period of economic bounty; factories that had been mobilized to create airplanes, artillery, and other military necessities were repurposed towards the manufacturing of popular culture, luxury items, and household products that were then exported worldwide. Produced amidst the arrival of American goods in the United Kingdom, Hamilton’s collage is one of the first works of what would be later known as the Pop Art movement: a genre which both celebrated and critiqued subjects such as consumerism, celebrities, and the cheapening of modern culture amidst the turn towards mass-production.

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Fiyaz, Daniel, Noam, Rebecca, Taz, Mahir

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Fiyaz, Daniel, Noam, Rebecca, Taz, Mahir

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Description:
Born in Germany just months shy of the end of World War II, Anselm Kiefer came of age in the late 1960s when the silence surrounding the crimes of the Nazi regime was ruptured by a vocal younger generation horrified by their collective German “past,” struggling to reconcile such shame and redefine what it meant to be German in a post-Nazi world.

For Kiefer, who had studied with the artists Peter Dreher in Karlsruhe and Joseph Beuys in Dusseldorf, painting became the arena to vocalize and elucidate his contempt for the Nazis and their reprehensible legacy, instilling every brush stroke with palpable rage, grief, and shame. In the 1970s, Kiefer developed a signature style that was influenced in part by the Neo-expressionist style of Georg Baselitz, but also by his teacher Beuys, particularly Beuys’s tendency to use commonplace materials, such as fat and felt within his artistic practice. Kiefer augmented his thick layers of impasto with lead, glass, straw, wood, dried flowers, and more, yielding highly textured, viscous surfaces. As his list of materials grew, so too did the scale of his canvases, which though large and formidable, felt ephemeral and fragile as a result of the materials he utilized.
All of the canonical elements of Kiefer’s work are present in Shulamite—a thick impasto resulting from a hardened mixture of oil, acrylic, emulsion, and shellac; a brittle, textured surface infused with commonplace materials (in this case, straw and ash); mythological or biblical references (Shulamite refers to the heroine in the Song of Solomon); a literary reference (Celan’s “Death Fugue”); and a historical subject or location (a Nazi Memorial Hall in Berlin).

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Title: Giap’s Igloo Creator: Mario Merz (1968)

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Can art be made out of scrap? (Ms. DeMarco sample)

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Can art be made out of scrap? (Ms. DeMarco sample)

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Materials: metal, wire mesh, bags of clay soil, neon, batteries

Description:
North Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp said, “If the enemy masses his forces, he loses ground; if he scatters, he loses strength” to describe the perils one faces in battle. Regardless of the benefits gained from a military strategy, it could lead to other disadvantages. Across the surface of the igloo in white neon tubing is written the statement made by General Giáp translated into Italian: “Se il nemico si concentra perde terreno se si disperde perde forza.”

Art movement: Arte Povera (known for their use of everyday materials: literally "poor" art)

Historical contextualization: Many of these Italian artists came of age after World War II, when the socio-economic landscape of Italy was rapidly transforming as it recovered from the devastation of the war. This was also a period of intense social upheaval. Students and workers united to protest unfair labor and education conditions. U.S. monetary aid sent to rebuild Europe’s economy helped to improve the production of material goods and repair infrastructure. At the same time, a new influx of American capitalist and consumer values was transforming Italian culture, which led many Italians to oppose U.S. influence, a reaction that was expressed through works of art. The U.S. military presence in Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s led to heightened hostility among Europeans who grew increasingly critical of the violence occurring abroad.

Personal analysis: I thought this piece was interesting because the viewer must walk around several times to understand the quote. The audience is directly involved in trying to decipher the meaning of the words and its connection to the physical object. It reminds me of the artist in the movie Iron Giant (1999) that creates art out of scrap metal.

Questions: What types of places did artists from the movement find these materials?

Source (s): https://smarthistory.org/merz-giap-igloo/

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European artists responded to the devastation of World War II with new subjects and methods.

1945 - 1980

Regions in postwar European art

France

Switzerland

Germany

Britain

Poland

All content | Postwar European art

Dead rabbits, walking stick figures, blurry paintings of photographs-European art expresses the pathos of the postwar era.

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European artists responded to the devastation of World War II with new subjects and methods. 1945 - 1980 Dead rabbits, walking stick figures, blurry paintings of photographs-European art expresses the pathos of the postwar era.