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Eternal unlimited universe, love for humanity, and longing for peace in the world—these concepts become increasingly serious through the development of my philosophy of life and art.

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Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

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Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

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Nam June Paik. Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S. 1995 

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Nam June Paik. Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S. 1995 

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Nam June Paik, electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., 1995:

Video art

Monitors behind each state with different imagery

Prevalence of tv in America, rapidly changing

Most Americans experience the world through tv screens; tv=real life

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Began feminist art movement

Background as a minimalist (one of the boys); not included in reviews of shows

Cutting edge group of artists still very traditional in one way: domination by males

Decided to pay homage to important women throughout history, many ignored in history books

Extensive research

39 place settings, 13 at each side (symbolism?)

919 other women’s names inscribed in tiles

Hand-painted ceramic plates in period style, embroidered runner also in period style: mediums associated with women: needlework, painted china, ceramics

Sense of community and ritual (Last Supper now spiritual communion of women)

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Betye Saar, Shield of Quality, 1974:

“brazenly representational”: no attempt to accommodate art establisment

Also dedicated to Aftrican-American heritage

Like Louise Nevelson but personal objects, meaningful, intimate

Objects and pictures relating to her great aunt; triptych like—portable altar

Small!

Focuses on women and important role of women

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Response to Happenings/Performance Art

Frozen environments; white, plaster figures (plaster casts using plaster medical bandages)

Alienation of contemporary life; lethargic, very alone, drained of life

Modern objects, advanced technology, but meaningless; no spirituality or human interaction

What is the meaning of modern existence? Like Edward Hopper

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Dan Flavin. the nominal three (to William of Ockham). 1963 

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Dan Flavin. the nominal three (to William of Ockham). 1963 

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Medium is fluorescent tubes of light; reduced to bare essentials (no paint, no canvas, etc.); where else could you go?

Art that can’t be collected; Is there anything still traditional? museum setting

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Reliance upon geometry, mathematical measurements; emphasized conceptual rather than emotional content; favored materials and processes of mass production

Lacks artists’ hand; not personal; no sign of artist except in concept

Non-art materials: plexiglass, fluorescent tubes, galvanized steel

Wanted to make art that did not look like art—nothing but what you see; no references

Admire what you see: scale, color, texture, proportions; takes away base, glass case—props that announce an object to be a work of art

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Entirely flat, pinstripes=lines of canvas showing through

Canvas now has a life of its own—not rectangular; sculptural (blurs distiction between painting and sculptures)

No push-pull of space

“What you see is what you see.” No hidden meanings, symbols, references: stripped down vocabulary=Minimal Art

(so why title?)

Geometrical precision

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Environments or installations

Interested in Rauschenberg, Nevelson using objects from everyday life

Allover look of Jackson Pollock (wrote that the next step after Pollock was to make environmental art)

Not permanent

Walk through it, experience

No meaning attached; left to viewer

Performance Art, Happenings

Simultaneous actions: painting, juicing oranges, speaking fragments of sentences: human participation, element of change

Like a combine in time and space

Reminds me of switching channels on tv or radio

Lots of performance art followed

George Brecht: Motor Vehicle Sunset Event: people drew cards with instructions: at a parking lot revved engines, honked horns, rolled down windows, slammed doors shut, opened and closed hoods and trunks

Finding beauty in everyday ordinariness?

How different from theater? Takes place in an art context

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Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm: Number 30. 1950 

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Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm: Number 30. 1950 

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After WWII: Turning point in the art world: focus shifted from Paris to NY

America’s first major art movement, Abstract Expressionism; evolved from Surrealism; influence of many European artists in NY during wars

Like Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky—breaking new rules (how many?)

Story: Asked his wife Lee Krasner “Is this a painting?”

Gesture paintings: about process; Allover paintings: no focal point; culmination of trend of the emergence of the picture plane as an independent entity (since Cezanne—even Manet)

Existentialism reaction to destruction of world wars: no absolute truths

“The one thing that could be trusted and believed in was the self, and that became the sole subject of Abstract Expressionist painting”—individualism; no mistaking one artist for another (story about art teacher; students all did Pollock style);

Precedent to performance art; canvas totally gone, spontaneous, end product unknown

"It is impossible to make a forgery of Jackson Pollock's work," Time magazine critic Robert Hughes claimed in 1982. "It is what his imitators could never do, and why there are no successful Pollock forgeries: they always end up looking like...spaghetti, whereas Pollock--in his best work--had an almost preternatural control over the total effect of those skeins and receding depths of paint. In them, the light is always right. Nor are they absolutely spontaneous; he would often retouch the drip with a brush."
from Cody, Wyoming

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Dan Flavin. the nominal three (to William of Ockham). 1963 

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Dan Flavin. the nominal three (to William of Ockham). 1963 

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Medium is fluorescent tubes of light; reduced to bare essentials (no paint, no canvas, etc.); where else could you go?

Art that can’t be collected; Is there anything still traditional? museum setting

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Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare, Nov. 26, 1965

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Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Paintings to a Dead Hare, Nov. 26, 1965

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Performance art/conceptual art

Autobiographical: fighter pilot in Hitler’s Luftwaffe in WW2; told story that his plane was shot down in a snowstorm over Crimea and that nomads saved him from freezing by covering him in animal fat and felt (materials here reflecting humanity and spirituality: felt on shoe, fat on chair; steel attached to right foot to show hard reason; face covered in honey (life force) and cold—magical, shaman-like

Moved lips for 3 hours instructing dead hare about pictures surrounding him; meaninglessness of conventional picture-making that has to be explained; art should be spiritual, direct, understandable to viewer.

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude.  Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin counties, California. 1972–76

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude.  Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin counties, California. 1972–76

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How can art compete with mass media? The masses don’t go to art museums, so he decided to bring art to the people

Not lasting museum pieces: felt that the creative process was more important than the finished work:

the recording of the work by the media (let the media work for you—like Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol)

working with farmers to get their permission to use their land

getting local people to help with the construction

beauty of finished project: Jars us into seeing the environment in a new way; natural element of wind

Local people skeptical at first, but many were proud of it at the end; hard-hat workers moved by the experience; also by his total belief in what he was doing; charismatic, converted people to his art (story about one rancher who had fought it slept next the the fence one night with his son and had a transformative experience

Not elitist—brought art experience to normal people; link between fine art and real world

Cost 3 million dollars; Christo funded himself through drawings, but hundreds of thousands saw it vs. painting sold to private collector and never seen

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Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah. 1970 

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Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah. 1970 

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The earth is the canvas; environmental scale

Just as time erodes civilizations and all things, the jetty will eventually disappear

Subject is entropy and change (salt encrusted, etc.)

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More than 11 feet wide;

Reduced painting to a barebones simplicity: Hard-Edge Abstraction; machine precision

Geometric shapes in solid primary and secondary colors; no figure and ground; all on same plane

Only about color and movement; no reference to artist; no reference to  subject or meaning; strips everything else away

Left side fixed, right side has movement?

Figure/ground relationships change?

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Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1961–64 

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Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1961–64 

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Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1961-64: images from everyday life (like Dutch art) but no reverence, not carefully arranged, no hidden symbolism or meaning

All 32 types of Campbell’s soups at the time; monotonous, repetitive (indifferent vs. emotionalism of abstract expressionism)

Called studio the Factory; used silkscreen process; removes artists’ hand, individualism

Workaholic, highly involved in process; but gave illusion of barely touching work

Art is a commodity; name brand product, not necessarily about technique or craftsmanship (you want to buy a Warhol)

Pervasiveness of advertising, mass production, uniformity, consumerism: a portrait of America

hand painting the mass production products

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Imagery of mass media; took “low art” forms (commercial art) and made it into “high art”;

Revealed manipulative impact of mass media

Make art that doesn’t look like art (idea from Environments, Happenings)

Looked to comic books, newspapers; liked the bold outlines, lack of depth/dimension

Known for seeing beauty in low art

Blurs distinctions between fine art and mass culture

Used benday dots; when seen up close, they become flat abstract patterns

Reveals cultural stereotypes of men and women at the time

Artist’s hand/presence not visible; machine-like (opposite AE artists)

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Friends with Rauschenberg; began as a window decorator

Chose everyday, familiar forms

Takes readymades(flags) and paints over them

Paintings about painting: non-illusionistic, no specific meaning or emotion (can you remove emotion from flag?)

Wax-based encaustic; painterly

3 canvases stacked: 3-D from canvases, not from illusionistic painting; an image is a sign or symbol of something else, not the thing itself (this is a painting of a flag, not a flag—Magritte: This is not a Pipe)

Predecessor to Pop Art

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New generation of artists rejected Abstract Expressionism

Rauschenberg: “Abstract Expressionism was all about suffering and self-expression and the State of Things. I just wasn’t interested in that, and I certainly did not have any interest in trying to improve the world through painting.”

Took off where Duchamp left off: painted canvases completely white; in response, avant-garde composer John Cage wrote a piano piece called 4’33”, first performed in Woodstock, NY in 1952: pianist opened keyboard, did nothing else for 4 minutes and 33 seconds; audience listened to sounds of the real world; then the keyboard case was shut, signaling the end of the piece

“I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is. And I think a pictures is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.”

Combines: works that combined painting, sculpture, collage, found objects

Odalisk: lamp (electric light inside); magazines, newspapers, thrift shops, garbage—mass production, throwaway

Title: pun on odalisque and obelisk; sexual allusions but no explanation; this is life

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Louise Nevelson. Sky Cathedral—Moon Garden Plus One. 1957–60 

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Louise Nevelson. Sky Cathedral—Moon Garden Plus One. 1957–60 

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Black boxes filled with found objects; fragments of furniture and architecture; also became larger, wall-sized

Fragments of civilization, of one’s life, of the cosmos

Nevelson wanted her black works to be illuminated by a blue light, suggesting twilight, when things begin to look different and to change into something else—moment of transformation

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David Smith. Cubi series as installed at Bolton’s Landing, New York. Left: Cubi XVIII, 1964. Center: Cubi XVII, 1963. Right: Cubi XIX, 1964

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David Smith. Cubi series as installed at Bolton’s Landing, New York. Left: Cubi XVIII, 1964. Center: Cubi XVII, 1963. Right: Cubi XIX, 1964

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Contemporary of abstract expressionists; began as a painter, started welding steel; drawings of organic forms in space

Began using reserves of metal he had on hand, unplanned

In Cubi series, he ordered precut stainless steel and assembled; geometric, but unemotional?

Giant, monumental (size influenced by AE artists); precarious—impermanence of all things

Burnished the steel to give it a textured, painterly surface

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Helen Frankenthaler. Mountains and Sea. 1952 

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Helen Frankenthaler. Mountains and Sea. 1952 

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Oil painting (with a thin layer to mimic the effect of water color)

Developed Stain painting: put canvas on the floor like Pollock, made quick charcoal sketches, poured thin oil paint on it, tilted it to allow paint to run (didn’t use brush)

Paint bled into unprimed canvas; translucent like watercolor; not tactile like impasto; couldn’t see artist’s hand: post-painterly abstraction (evolved from abstract expressionism)

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Mark Rothko, No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953

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Mark Rothko, No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953

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Flip side of Abstract Expressionism: Color-Field Painting

Mystical quality: Large meditative planes of color to express universal forces; sublime (vast, large canvases)

Main color-field painters: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clifford Still; all started out by making Surrealist paintings based on mythical themes

Rothko: flat planes of color; no storytelling, no symbols; mystical, oneness with cosmic forces

Thin layers of paint; glowing,  “spiritual light”; ragged edges, cloudlike, organic; suggest infinity, spiritual aura

Focus on human emotion connection, evokes a sense of emotions

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Stuart Davis, Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors - 7th Avenue Style. 1940.

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Stuart Davis, Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors - 7th Avenue Style. 1940.

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Essence of the modern experience through abstraction—influenced by Armory Show: flying in an airplane, looking down from a towering skyscraper, riding in a speeding car, advertising, jazz, pulse and energy

Like synthetic Cubism

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Precisionism: Precise lines and diagonal, also referring technology advancement in USA

Grain elevators

Hard-edged, geometric, Cubist; Precisionism (not only because of precise line, but also because of precision of machines and industry; unlike Cubism, not distorted

Title: Americas pyramids; mighty

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Spanish Civil War: Hitler provided military support for the Nationalists under leadership of fascist dictator Franco; Nazi pilots used saturation bombing to attack the undefended Basque town of Guernica, killing thousands of civilians.

Painted as a protest;  This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war (compare to Goya 3rd of May); crucifixion pose

Why black and white? Thought color would distract

Why lines of hatching? Newspaper look; immediacy of journalism; contemporary event

Bull=forces of brutality and darkness; horse=the people

Bird=dove of peace (annihilated)

Picasso refused to let Gernica be displayed in Spain while Franco was still alive

Last major history painting; end of belief that a painting can be a catalyst for change (we are too bombarded by images daily)

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Garish light and colors of Van Gogh’s Night Café, 1888

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Two versions of the painter

began painting while recovering from a bus accident at age 18; interested in native folk art and dress; introspective and about emotional and physical pain

Left: European Frida; pale, Victorian dress (father was Hungarian Jew); right is Mexican Frida, darker and in peasant costume (mother Indian and Creole)

European Frida cuts the blood connection to the indigenous self

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Mexican Art: Seeking a National Identity

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Mexican Art: Seeking a National Identity

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Mexican Revolution in 1910-1921; focus on indigenous traditions while rejecting European influences

Government building campain led to mural commissions; rise in muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Siquieros, and Jose Clemente Orozco

Socialists or Communists; proclaimed murals as the true art of the people

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Jacob Lawrence, “In the North the Negro Had Better Educational Facilities,” from the Migration of the Negro series, 1940-41

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Jacob Lawrence, “In the North the Negro Had Better Educational Facilities,” from the Migration of the Negro series, 1940-41

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Jacob Lawrence, In the North the Negro Had Better Educational Facilities, from the series The Migration of the Negro; tempera on hardboard

Series of 60 paintings documenting mass migration (6 million) of African Americans from the south to the north

Factors included racism and Jim Crow laws, but also jobs to fill in the industrialized north

About movement and change

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After WWI, hundreds of thousands African-Americans moved from the south to escape racism and poverty and moved to the northern states; many to Chicago and NYC (Harlem); search for cultural identity; movement called Harlem Renaissance

Wanted to tell their story and experience from their own point of view

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Shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930 (still there), brought Wood to national attention

Window into Midwest world where Wood grew up and lived

What can you tell about these people?

Fictitious father and spinster daughter, God-fearing descendants of settlers

Religious: numerous crosses: windows, porch, overalls (repeats pitchfork pattern), church steeple, Gothic window

Neat and clean: crisp drawing, verticals and horizontals

Industrious: pitchfork, plants on porch

Frugal: old-fashioned clothes, nothing modern (time of Depression)

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RepresentationalLocal (Midwest) imagery

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First showed her work at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery (“At last, a woman on paper”)

Close-ups of flowers; image so magnified it becomes abstract (influenced by close-up photography of Paul Strand)

Critics felt it had sexual references

O’Keeffe denied that they were about sexuality;  “if you see other things in the flower, it is because of the universality present in nature”

Quote: “I’ll paint it big, and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it. . . I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

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Dutch movement

Sought to create utopian environment through geometric abstraction

Sought universal order that would make nationalism obsolete

Also called International Style and Neo-Plasticism

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Piet Mondrian. Composition No.II/Composition I// Composition en Rouge, Bleu et Jaune (Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow). 1930

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Piet Mondrian. Composition No.II/Composition I// Composition en Rouge, Bleu et Jaune (Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow). 1930

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Mondrian with other artists in Amsterdam founded a movement called De Stijl:; spiritual mission;

Friend and philosopher Schoenmaekers wrote that there was an underlying mathematical structure to the universe that constituted true reality;

Mondrian based art on this theory; called it Neo Plasticism

Asymmetrical but harmonious; no foreground or background; all on same plane (asserts the presence of the picture plane—going back to Manet, Cezanne, etc.)

Tries to convey complexity and simplicity of universe; everything fits together

Mondrian felt that art can be a catalyst for change; new language (like Malevich)

Cubist influence; also stained glass

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Influenced by Brancusi, Arp, Miro, Picasso

Also non-western art, including Pre-Columbian art

Reminiscent of a Classical reclining river-goddess; but based more directly on Pre-Columbian figures.

Interested in portraying elemental and universal

We see woman but know it is also stone; millions of years old; one with the stone

Earth goddess or fertility figure; also a landscape; mother earth

Interplay between solid and void; suggests womb or tide pools

Many interpreters liken the undulating form of his reclining figures to the landscape and hills of his birthplace, Yorkshire. His ability in later life to fulfill large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy. Yet he lived frugally and most of the money he earned went towards endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.[1]

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Alexander Calder. Lobster Trap and Fish Tail. 1939 

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Alexander Calder. Lobster Trap and Fish Tail. 1939 

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American, settled in Paris, befriended Miro and Mondrian

Started making mobiles in the early 1930’s; painted sheet metal, balanced so that movement in air makes them glide and turn in space

Organic shapes like Miro and Arp; suggest natural forms

Sculpture? Flat; like drawing in air; but moves in space

Simple colors: primary, secondary, black and white

Childlike, joyous

Flat space and depth combined

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Meret Oppenheim. Object (Luncheon in Fur). 1936 

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Meret Oppenheim. Object (Luncheon in Fur). 1936 

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Daughter of a Jungian psychologist

Juxtaposition two desirable things; becomes disturbing

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Surrealist object

Gift for composer Erik Satie

Tacks glued onto flat side of an iron

Suggests pain, violence, uselessness?

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Henri Cartier-Bresson. Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare. 1932 

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Henri Cartier-Bresson. Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare. 1932 

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Sought to find the extraordinary in the ordinary; turned to photography

“decisive moment”: “using intuition you ask your artistic question and decide almost simultaneously.”

Surreal juxtaposition; shapes, water, ladder, suspension in air

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Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931 

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Salvador Dalí. The Persistence of Memory. 1931 

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Stream of consciousness process: one thing led to another

Time? Rational, measured

Death, deterioration

Everything is irrational—attack on the rational

Viewers’ own unconscious

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Not all surrealist art was nonrepresentational

Claims superiority of unconscious mind over conscious mind

Iris like eclipsed sun, behind which lies unconscious; eye absorbs only the visual world, but not the inner world of the unconscious

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René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-29

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René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-29

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From Barcelona, went to Paris, started painting from his imagination (or hallucinations brought on by starvation, he claimed)

Wiry line, childlike drawing of Paul Klee

Biomorphic forms float on top of minimal color field (behind drawings)—oil, but thin like washes

Suggest microscopic forms, spirits, prehistoric forms; mythic images, primal state

(how many ways can we not show depth?)

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Made drawings and prints because they could be mass-produced, wider audiences;

Didn’t like elitist nature of art, academies (couldn’t get in because she was a woman)

Sympathized with working class and victims of war; husband was a doctor who treated the poor; became the subjects of her art

Reminds me of Liberty Leading the People (new cause)

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Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919. Photomontage

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Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919. Photomontage

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Photomontage

Images of contemporary life made by photographers for popular press; camera is another machine associated with technological advances that led to war

Manipulated images by hand; cut with kitchen knife (no machinery); humanized the mechanical; antiwar

Antiwar Kathe Kollwitz at center, antidada at sides

Didn’t use collage to make something beautiful or refined; looked crude and anti-art; message of protest about modern society and regime of Weimar Republic

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Raoul Hausmann. Mechanical Head (Spirit of the Age). ca. 1920 

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Raoul Hausmann. Mechanical Head (Spirit of the Age). ca. 1920 

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Assemblage: made of found objects assembled

Mindless, lifeless dummy; mechanical, robotic, no personal identity

“The typical German has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued onto the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty.”

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Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, from The Blind Man. May 1917

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Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, from The Blind Man. May 1917

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Duchamp went to NYC to escape war

“DADA” applied in retrospect; similar goals

“Readymade”; entered in 1917 independent art show

Rejected (although non-juried show); Duchamp knew committee would not consider it art

Issues: What is art? Does it have to be created? (He CHOSE it); art is about ideas

Defies conventional notions of beauty

HUMOR

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Hans Arp, Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17

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Hans Arp, Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17

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Dada poetry: random words, pulled out of a hat, nonwords (abstract)

Movement started in Zurich (center for war protests)

Made abstract collages by dropping pieces of torn rectangular paper on the floor; where they fell determined the composition (chance=nature, truth)

Sought to capture abstract universal forces (like Kandinsky)

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Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying. 

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Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying. 

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Trying to show experience of flying; new relationship to the universe

Reproductions don’t show organic qualities, hand of the artist

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Giorgio de Chirico. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. 1914 

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Giorgio de Chirico. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. 1914 

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Strong diagonal lines, disjointed space like Cubism

Classical buildings, figurative=allegiance to classical past

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Influences: Cubism (fracturing), stained glass windows (worked in that medium), folk art

symbolism?: circles=cycles of life

Blooming bush=birth

Farmer with scythe=death

Tree of life

Having been in Paris for just one year, Chagall painted this work from memories of his native village outside Vitebsk, Belarus. The cow and the man stare directly into one another’s eyes, suggesting the mutual dependence of peasants and animals. For orthodox Jews, animals were humanity’s link to the universe; look closely and you’ll see the sun, the earth and the moon in orbit. In reference to his very personal response to Cubism, Chagall once said "Lines, angles, triangles, squares, carry me far away to enchanting horizons.”

Chagall saw Jesus on the Cross as a universally recognizable symbol of human suffering. Chagall hoped that Jews and non-Jews alike would be able to relate to this symbol. By making Jesus unmistakably Jewish, he was highlighting the fact that the Romans crucified Jesus as a Jew. In the midst of the Holocaust, Chagall wanted to make the universality of Jesus’ crucifixion specific again, he wanted the world to look at Jewish suffering.

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Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel. 1913/1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913)

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Marcel Duchamp. Bicycle Wheel. 1913/1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913)

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Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel

Significance of “Readymades”: Art is about ideas, not just something beautiful to look at

Challenges notion that art requires technical skill and craftsmanship

Interpretations? Pedastol with bust?

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Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. 1912 

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Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. 1912 

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Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912: (2-minute masterpieces: start at :27)

Influenced by Cubism, Futurism

Machinelike: idealizes progress, motion, modernity, science’s ability to improve the world

1913 Armory show: an art critic for the New York Times wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory," and cartoonists satirized the piece. It spawned dozens of parodies in the years that followed.

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Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913 (cast 1931)

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Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913 (cast 1931)

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Want to destroy the past

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Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912

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Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912

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After the Futurists visited Paris together in 1911, several of them adopted aspects of Cubism, though they altered the technique to focus more clearly on Futurist concerns like modern technology, movement, and speed

More than one moment at a time; impermanence;  influence of Cubism, photography

Optimism of modernity: machines, motion, etc.

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Eadweard Muybridge. Untitled (sequence photographs of the trot , and gallop), from La Nature, December 1878

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Eadweard Muybridge. Untitled (sequence photographs of the trot , and gallop), from La Nature, December 1878

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Pioneering work in photographic studies of motion

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Wanted to convey motion, dynamic imagery, and social progress

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Combined influences found in The Blue Rider Almanac, including children’s art, tribal art, music

Grid of Cubism

Colors like Matisse, Kandinsky

Directness and naivete of children’s and folk art

Luminescent colors of stained glass windows

Sense of spirituality

Symbols: Jewish star of David, Islamic crescent moon, primitive hieroglyphic suns

Tree: life (same rays as suns: earth and sky connected)

Rectangular planes: trees, ,plants, fire, sky, earth?

Understated; strips everything inessential

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Vasily Kandinsky. Sketch I for “Composition VII.” 1913 

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Vasily Kandinsky. Sketch I for “Composition VII.” 1913 

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“A scientific event cleared my way of one of the greatest impediments. This was the further division of the atom. The crumbling of the atom was to my soul like the crumbling of the whole world.”

Completely non-objective; wanted to express universal spiritual forces, abstract mystical powers;

Simple, direct, spiritual

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Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912

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Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912

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Musical titles: focus on communicating directly with the senses

Like Whistler

Felt music was free from imitation: color, line, form counterparts of notes, chords, rhythms, harmonies

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Peter Schlemihl: Tribulations of Love. 1915 

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Peter Schlemihl: Tribulations of Love. 1915 

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Die Brucke artists drawn to woodblock prints because they liked the crude, unsophisticated look and rawness;

Nationalistic mood; used by German artists during early Renaissance

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913

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Critique of the modern society: everything is on sale

about prostitute

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Street, Dresden. 1908 (dated 1907 on painting) 

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Street, Dresden. 1908 (dated 1907 on painting) 

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Influences: Van Gogh, Matisse, Munch

Feelings of modern society in Germany: decadent, immoral, materialistic; monstrous women

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Pablo Picasso. Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass. 1912

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Pablo Picasso. Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass. 1912

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Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass, 1912.

Synthetic Cubism: in 1912 Braque and Picasso began working in collage; complicates notion of real and illusion; paper/ wallpaper/ chair caning is real and an illusion (a picture)

Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass, 1912.

complicates notion of real and illusion; paper/ wallpaper/ chair caning is real and an illusion (a picture)

Woodgrain was painted by Picasso and cut out

“Instead of a window, the picture surface became a tray on which art was served.” (art is on top of the canvas, not behind)

What has the most depth? She modeled glass, which is the only thing drawn?

Instead of breaking down images, now building up

Introduced a variety of textures and colors  (in analytic Cubism they used monochromatic colors)

Used musical themes because music is abstract, like their art; also notes are abstract symbols

Play with space: guitar soundhole should be negative space, but it is a solid circle of paper

Le Jou—again, pun about Le Journal, jouer (to play)

La Bataille s’est Engage (the battle is joined): First Balkan war in Europe; also battlefield between Picasso and Braque working on a new medium

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Analytical Cubism

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Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, (The Young Ladies of Avignon). 1907

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Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, (The Young Ladies of Avignon). 1907

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Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon), 1907 (stop at 7)

What rules of western art from the past 400 years does Picasso break?

Forms unreadable

Perspective skewed

No shadow or doesn’t make sense

Color--not representative

Space—impossible to read

Notions of feminine beauty

Influences?

Manet—women look straight at us, confront viewer

Cezanne-planes, different points of view

Matisse-color

African and Iberian masks

Opened up artistic freedom: line, plane, color, mass, void all freed from representational roles and can take on a life of their own

How did this lead to Cubism?

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Henri Matisse. Portrait of Madame Matisse/The Green Line, 1905

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Henri Matisse. Portrait of Madame Matisse/The Green Line, 1905

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Henri Matisse. Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat). 1905 

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Henri Matisse. Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat). 1905 

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Akua’ba, n.d., (Asante people) Ghana, wood

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Akua’ba, n.d., (Asante people) Ghana, wood

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Used to help with conception

Demonstrates three important qualities of womanhood (wisdom (large forehead), girth (ringed neck is intended to denote rolls of fat, showing that woman is capable of bearing a healthy child), and the prime of life) that relate to her physical and mental abilities.

Akua’ba figures were important fertility aids among Akan-speakers in Ghana in the past. They depict an abstracted female form in wood and were created by male carvers.

Depicts a highly abstracted and idealized woman in the prime of life

The figure is also always female, since Akan culture is matrilineal.

Taken out of the Akan context, altered by Western tastes (which might add beads and paint), and marketed as a universal symbol of Africa, the akua’ba figure is now part of Western popular culture.

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Headdress: Female Antelope (Ci Wara), 19th–20th century Mali, Bamako region, Bamana, wood, metal bands

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Headdress: Female Antelope (Ci Wara), 19th–20th century Mali, Bamako region, Bamana, wood, metal bands

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In performance, the paired dancers symbolize the union between men and women, essential for the continuity of the community. The formal features of the headdress also reference elements of nature necessary to sustain life. The male serves as a metaphor for the sun, while the female is associated with the earth. The long strands of raffia fibers attached to the headdress, concealing the dancer, are likened to streams of water.

Elegant play of positive and negative space.

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Headdress: Male Antelope (Ci Wara), 19th–20th century Mali, Bamako region, Bamana, wood, metal bands

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Headdress: Male Antelope (Ci Wara), 19th–20th century Mali, Bamako region, Bamana, wood, metal bands

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Refer to the mythic culture hero Ci Wara, a divine force conceived of as half man and half antelope. Bamana oral traditions credit Ci Wara with introducing to humanity agricultural methods and an understanding of earth, animals, and plants

Worn in village-wide performances that celebrated the skills of successful farmers. These performances featured a pair of dancers wearing sculpted headdresses, one representing a male antelope and the other a female. They held sticks in their hands to paw the earth just as the mythic Ci Wara did when he first taught men to plant seeds.

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Kota (or Bakota), Gabon, Republic of the Congo: Reliquary guardian figure ‘mbulu ngulu’, from before or around 1920.

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Kota (or Bakota), Gabon, Republic of the Congo: Reliquary guardian figure ‘mbulu ngulu’, from before or around 1920.

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Wood covered with metal sheets of brass or copper

Formal elements? Geometric shapes, flat

Headdress

Body abstracted to diamond shape framing empty space (negative space)

Also covered a reliquary containing ancestral bones; traditional (ironically inspired breaking with tradition in western Europe)

Ancestor cult: they lay the deceased out in the forest and later buried in the earth; later, skulls of important leaders were excavated and placed in large baskets with other remembrance objects.

Baskets sealed and preserved in sacred shrine huts

Reliquary guardian figures attached to each vessel with triangular portion reaching into the vessel

Baskets brought out for important ceremonies, opened and contents presented, explained, honored

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Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema-o-Byeri), Gabon, Fang peoples, mid 18th to mid 19th century, wood and iron

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Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema-o-Byeri), Gabon, Fang peoples, mid 18th to mid 19th century, wood and iron

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The Fang people of Gabon associate large heads with infancy, an age in a state of greater harmony with ancestors

Placed on a reliquary chest as a guardian figure

Symbolizes connection with ancestors and desire for continuation (children)

timelessness

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Constantin Brancusi. Bird in Space. 1928 (unique cast) 

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Constantin Brancusi. Bird in Space. 1928 (unique cast) 

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Worked on a few things over and over again, used different materials

Also designed pedastol, height of display (low for newborn, high for bird in space)

We don’t see a bird; Spirit of flight