Asserts that the artist is free to use color independently of natural appearance, building a structure of abstract color shapes and lines

What are the jobs of color in classical painting? What are the jobs of color in Matisse?

Flattens

Abstracts

Expressive

Forces us to look at color, not objects

Looked to contemporary life; nightclubs, cabarets

Figures elongated, floating

Space compressed, tilted

Isolation, alienation, angst

Predecessors? Munch’s The Scream, Van Gogh’s Bedroom, Matisse Portrait of Lady with a Hat

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

What are the jobs of color in classical painting? What are the jobs of color in Matisse?

Flattens

Abstracts

Expressive

Forces us to look at color, not objects

How is flatness of the picture plane reinforced?

Space defined by red: flatness reinforced by arabesques of plant life on wall and table (is it printed or real on table?)--ambiguous

(See Cezanne)

Window also ambiguous: could be painting or window

The subject is red (like Whistler)

All pattern—Vuillard

Compare to poetry: poetry uses words for sounds and rhythms as much as meaning; Matisse uses color and shapes for visual harmony as much as meaning

MOMA

Tangible items are paintings, art materials: art is the real world

Figure-ground reversal

How is space shown and not shown?

How does Derain deemphasize the depth of the image?

What is new?

What is traditional?

l. Derives from a crucified Christ by Grunewald or Bosch; part of series called Miserere (Latin for “have mercy”);

Later work colors intensify to achieve the glow of stained glass (as a youth he apprenticed with a stained-glass artist)—thick black outline

“The sense of calm and the hope of salvation in the later paintings mark him as one of the few authentic religious painters of the modern world” (H.H.Arnason/Elizabeth C. Mansfield, History of Modern Art, 6th edition, 2010, 122)

Minimized, abstracted

Made in marble, bronze, plaster—each unique

Looked to folk art for inspiration; wanted to be direct, authentic; didn’t want the smooth finish of academic style

Critique of modern society  

Interest in folk art—visited peasants in remote areas of Russia and loved their decorative painting and furniture in their homes

Space?

Color?

Explored revolutionary ideas about non-objective painting: no subject matter from the natural world; 1908 he entered the studio one day and could not make out any subject in one of his paintings—just shapes and colors. Then he realized it was on its side

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

“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

Practiced folk art of painting on underside of glass; simplified shapes, outlines like glass painting and stained glass; spatial compression

Fellow artists and friends Jawlensky and Werefkin, 

curved lines to emphasize "a sense of harmony, peace, and balance" in a spiritually-pure animal world; by viewing human beings are allowed to join this harmony.[2] 

Marc gave an emotional or psychological meaning to the colors he used in his work: blue was used for masculinity and spirituality, yellow represented feminine joy, and red encased the sound of violence and of base matter. 

Marc used blue throughout his career to represent spirituality and his use of vivid color is thought to have been an attempt to eschew the material world to evoke a spiritual or transcendental essence

Spatially little difference between subject/background

Influenced by Kandinsky, Cubism, Fauvism

Combines abstraction and literal representations; unity? Mood? Naïve joy?

Macke killed in early weeks of war, age 27

Admired the art of children, who seemed to create free of models or previous examples. In his own work he often strove to achieve a similar untutored simplicity

Often mystical; believed in realities beyond material world; spirituality through personal expression

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

Rachael McDonald: 

“I have loved all of the art that we have viewed in class, but one of the paintings that seemed to stick with me most is the painting by Paul Klee, The Nielsen. I am a fan of the abstract art I love the freedom to imagine it gives me as I view the art work. IN this painting I was really drawing in by the blocks of colors. I love how all of the colors seem to be stacked on top of each other and don't make a specific shape. Even though this is an abstract painting you can tell that it is portraying nature in a unique way. Along with abstract art I love nature. This painting makes me want to go camping in the mountains and admire the stars and the beautiful colors that nature creates.”

Mood?

Storytelling art; simplified forms

Sweeping power

This work was a response to WWI

At the beginning, he was a hopeful nationalist; as the fighting dragged on his disillusionment increased

Envisioned war less as a noble sword-bearer and more as ”a hammer-wielding butcher”

10 numbered casts made of this work (one in Harvard museums)

Gertrude Stein: American poet in Paris, owned one of best collections of contemporary, avant-garde art in Paris (with brothers Leo and Michael); had collection of Matisse and introduced Picasso to Matisse

Stein said she sat for Picasso ninety times while he painted her portrait; he kept repainting her face and then abandoned it to vacation in Spain; repainted from memory upon his return

1906 had seen exhibit of ancient Iberian sculpture that had been excavated 50 miles from his hometown; simplified, angular eyes

Looked to ancient and non-western art as a source of primitive inspiration—a colonialist notion that viewed “uncivilized” cultures to be more spiritually authentic than the sophisticated cities of Europe

Unconventional pose for a woman?

Fills her corner of space like a powerful work of sculpture

Communicates self-assured nature of a woman who proclaimed her own artistic genius

Considered by many to be most important painting of the 20th century

What’s the big deal? Shows power of art to confront

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: went to Paris’s ethnographic museum in June 1907  saw examples of African and Oceanic sculpture and masks; said his encounter provoked a “shock” and he went back to the studio and reworked his painting (altered two faces on the right); impressed with the power of African art

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

“reflects the artist’s . . . Characteristically misogynistic view of women as the carriers of life-threatening disease” (Arnasan, History of Modern Art,6th edition, 166)

How did this lead to Cubism?

What has he learned from Cezanne? Pictorial structure, patches of color, emphasis on geometric volumes 

pushed up on the picture plane; forms come forward rather than receding into space (even more than Cezanne)

Looks viewed from different positions (also like Cezanne)

Rejected at the 1908 Salon d’Automne (Matisse on jury); called his works Braque’s “little cubes” 

Louis Vauxcelles, critic who had coined the term “Fauve,” said Braque “reduces everything, places and figures and houses, to geometrical schemes, to cubes.”(thus the name Cubism)

New: stenciled letters (also fragments)—reference to dance hall posters; letters are inherently flat; emphasize flatness of canvas and its existence as an object

Introduction of words had far-reaching implications for modern art

Synthetic Cubism: in 1912 Braque and Picasso began working in collage; search for alternative modes of representation

Collage: word coined by Braque from french word coller—to paste (technique used by folk artists)

Different levels of reality: real rope as frame (not high art material)

  oil cloth printed with chair caning pattern: looks real (illusionism), but not—just reproduction; is the chair under the table?

  representations: glass, pipe, lemon: representations of real things; different angles make more real?

  word: completely abstract, but seem as physical as the rest

JOU: from a newspaper, Le Journal; but jou could also be a pun referring to jouer, “to play”

Smarthistory 4:16 *

Use of sheet metal unorthodox medium

Signs of references to reality, not imitations: sound hole projects, body is cut away; flat planes rather than volumes

Studied color theory of Chevreul; interested in light, movement, and the juxtaposition of contrasting colors

Non-objective? 

One of 6 siblings; 4 became artists

Died in WWI in 1918 at age 42

Adjectives?

Takes traditional subject and makes machine-like: strong, sleek, energetic

Spiral forms resemble pistons and turbines; 

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

What has he learned form Cubism? Limited colors, fragmented planes

What is new? multiplied to suggest motion: several moments at once

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

1913 Armory show—first international exhibition of modern art in the US

Critics singled this work out as the most outrageous: 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.

Interested by Russian-Jewish folktales, religion

Moved to Paris in 1910

Influences: Fauvist color, 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.”

Window: view onto what?

Janus figure: two-faced (Roman god of doorways): two realms of Paris: real and imagined

Cat: Cerberus figure (mythical 3-headed dog who guards the underworld): partition between two realms

Train floats upside down, parachuter, pedestrians sideways

Matisse had liberated color from reality, Picasso had liberated space/objects reality; what does Chagall liberate?

Andre Breton, surrealist poet, recognized Chagall’s ”liberation of the object from the laws of weight and gravity.”

Classical buildings, figurative=allegiance to classical past; but uses deep perspective for emotional effect of loneliness, isolation, fear

Strong diagonal lines, disjointed space like Cubism

Railroad tracks in left corner: new juxtaposed with old architecture

The scene may be described matter-of-factly: an Italian city square with shadows lengthening in a late autumn afternoon; an arcade of shops closed for the day; railway tracks in the lower left corner; the shadow of a heroic nineteenth-century statue; a little girl hurrying home.

But ominous mood—why?

Visions of loneliness and nostalgia, fear of the unknown, premonitions of the future, depiction of reality beyond physical realm

Empty city square with monument: elements from artist’s studio and mannequin head; symbols of past architecture; what is the monument? What is the work of the present?

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

Optimism of modernity: machines, motion, etc.

”a great synthesis of labor, light, and movement” (Boccioni)

Influences: Russion icons (corner of room), folk art

Latest state of his Suprematist works: monochromatic paintings

Complete renunciation of the physical world

White=”real concept of infinity”

Counter-relief: as far away from traditional sculpture as he could make: untraditional materials (wood, rope, found objects, iron, and copper) and untraditional space: not on base or wall, but extended into viewer’s space

Industrial materials—iron, glass, steel: metal spiral frame enclosing 3 glass units (cylinder, cube, and cone); glass units were to house conferences and meetings and were to revolve, making a complete revolution once a year, once a month, and once a day, respectively

Symbolized new machine age—industrial materials and kinetic nature

In favour of art as a practice for social purposes

Embraced Russian Revolution—propaganda center for Communist Third International: symbolic of aspirations of communism

Socialist Realism became official style and put an end to works of art that were spiritually and aesthetically motivated

industrial, angular style of work

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

Dada=nonsense

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)

The story is that he tore up a drawing that displeased him and dropped the pieces on the floor, then suddenly saw in the way they landed the solution to the problems with which he had been struggling;

”I declared that these works, like nature, were ordered according to the laws of chance”; liberated from rational thought processes—distancing self from creative process.

Sought to capture abstract universal forces (like Kandinsky)

Reminiscent of hat stands

“DADA” applied in retrospect; similar goals in avant-garde circle in NY at 291, gallery founded by Alfred Stieglitz

“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

3 standard stoppages

Assemblage: made of found objects assembled (like 3-D collage): attached real objects to a wooden mannequin head: metal collapsing cup, tape measure, labels, and a pocketbook

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.”

Photomontage

Images of contemporary life made by photographers for popular press; appropriated from its normal context; 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

Satirical panorama of Weimar society

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 

Also interest in the new roles of women in postwar Germany, which had granted them the vote in 1918, two years before the US

 Schwitters made these collages in the wake of the First World War as hopeful portraits of how destruction can feed creation: how bits of advertising, scraps of newspaper, wood, garbage, and urban debris could all be collaged together into something new and beautiful; 

Schwitters’ art was more than just the collage object itself. It was a whole process, philosophy, and lifestyle, which he called merz—a nonsense word that became his kind of personal brand.

Group of young men following Death, who beats out the march to battle on a drum; 

Faces of fear, regret, hope

An arc fills space above figures, suggesting a rainbow or halo: the harbinger of their fate as martyrs for a pointless cause

Brutal battle field scenes as well as depictions of wounded and destitute veterans

Game of cards—war injuries have left them all as amputees, holding cards with toes or mangled hands

Faces damaged; the men have to cope with poorly fitting facial and scalp prostheses

Does not allow us to view with a single, easy response

Angry, fatalistic, wrenching

Bright, lurid colors

“His paintings initially seduce with their candy store hues before slapping the viewer with their shocking realism” (p. 258)

Violent statements of disgust with postwar Germany and humankind generally; political and social satire

"In a strange street by night, a hellish procession of dehumanized figures mills, their faces reflecting alcohol, syphilis, plague ... I painted this protest against a humanity that had gone insane."[1]

The painting seeks to emulate medieval depictions of hellscapes, mainly through dramatic colourisation—in particular through its use of red light—as well as through the depiction of multitudes of layered distorted bodies and limbs

The figure of Death rides above it all; Tall claustrophobic buildings are lined above the procession. They seem to heave and bend backwards and forwards, as if about to topple over and collapse onto those below.[2]Among these buildings is a lone small church, surrounded by bars, nightclubs and offices. Giving a literal voice to the "Dance of Death" depicted by the artist, a sign over one club reads "DANCE TONIGHT".[1]

Most Cubist-inspired work

Left: torture chamber; right: frustration, indecision

Central panel: king, mother, and child in boat, guided by veiled boatman; allusion to holy family, but not tied to specific symbols

“The king and Queen have freed themselves of the tortures of life—they have overcome them. The Queen carries the greatest treasure—Freedom—as her child in her lap. Freedom is the one thing that matters—it is the departure, the new start”

When the Nazis came into power in 1933, they stripped Beckmann of his teaching position in Frankfurt, and nearly 600 of his works were confiscated from museums throughout Germany

On opening day of the 1937 Degenerate Art Show in Munich, which showed several of his works, the artist and his wife fled to Amsterdam. He never returned to Germany. In 1947, after years of hiding from the Nazis, he accepted a teaching position at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and became a highly influential teacher; remained in the US for the rest of his life

California bay area artist—distance from NY scene

Quiet; the figures function as formal structure/shape but add psychological depth

Came into late but considerable fame as a portraitist of such searching, psychologically penetrating power that she seemed to be ‘stealing” the souls of her sitters.

Explored light and what it did to color; portraits, intimate landscapes

His painterly vision, which encompassed a fascination with nature and the ability to reveal extraordinariness in ordinary life, was heavily indebted to the French painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard

6’ x12’

Katz made an early choice of figuration and stuck with it throughout the heyday of abstraction

But took influences from abstraction, such as broad fields of flat, clean color, simplified drawing, epic scale

Modern billboard look; takes cues from photography, advertising, movies

Tension between specific and abstract

Close up but inaccessible

Photorealism

Used photos and made grid; shows minute facts; seems impersonal but only did close friends and family members

Airbrush—to eliminate brushstroke, sense of medium

Photorealism: clarity of detail, reflected light

Also used airbrush

But reminiscent of Dutch 17th-century Vanitas paintings

Skulls, candles, fruit, hourglass, and other reminders of the inevitibility of death

Graphite and acrylic on paper

Allover composition

Surface becomes nearly identical with the picture plane itself—undermines sense of distance

Took photorealism to sculpture

Closes the gap between art and life with a rude, decisive bang

Direct casting from live models  (like George Segal) in fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin

Adds to the textured reality of pores, wrinkles, and bulges, the coloration of skin, veins, bruises, etc.

Also adds clothing and accessories

Her use of appliqué and decorative motifs was seen as a critique of the reductive abstraction that dominated the art market at the time – a gesture that parodied the concise abstractions of male artists such as Frank Stella with an excess of decoration

Looked to history of art of women in the past—quilting, sewing, embroidery, weaving—which have been dismissed throughout history  as ”craft” instead of “art” and monumentalized ‘

(12’ across, 6 feet tall)

One of the most sensational work of the 70’s

occupied the entirety of Paula Cooper's SoHo gallery space. 

987 one foot-square painted steel plates stretching over an expanse of more than 150 feet 

has an overall monumentality, but its small-scale panels invite intimate interaction. 

She said she wanted to include everything

read from left to right; seven thematic sections; Introduction, Mountain, Line, House, Tree, Shape, and Ocean. Rhapsody adds joyful color and a narrative subject matter to the grid formation of Minimalist art of the 1960s.

Essence of Postmodernism: longing for symbolism and grandeur of the past but disembodied from the faith that inspired the original forms

Top section looks like Greek temple with columns, pediment

Broken pediment makes it look like  Chippendale style highboy chest, so it was nicknamed the “Chippendale building”; pun on skyscraper as a chest of drawers

Flat and sculptural

Representational and abstract

Historical and modern

(for example, Foucault philosophy that the regulated geometries of modern society, from the calendar to the office building, coincided with authoritarian control

Painted on textbook reproduction: draws attention to the transformation of art into a commodity

Levine is asserting that no art is new; all art borrows from predecessors; also underline the status accorded male artists

Shows how our response to images is manipulated by the construction of its presenter

Dichotomy: We and You/ Maker and manipulated

About one’s agenda being imposed on another by hierarchies in culture

Placeholders for the idea of works of art

Issues of class and art; wealthy collectors sponsor exhibitions, promote artists, and establish “taste”

Asks how anyone besides the wealthy can enjoy “souvenirs of that class of people who manipulate history to your exclusion.”

But ironic that these are bought and sold and put in galleries!

Appropriates stereotypical female roles from films, television shows, and commercials of the 1950’s and 60’s

Details of setting, background, clothes, wigs, makeup, lighting

Displays exquisite control over the tableaus; subject seems vulnerable to something outside the frame

We want to see her but never will; crisp detail but not the detail we want

Personal and impersonal

Based on Paul Celan's poem, "Death Fugue," published 1947

“your golden hair Margareta
 your ashen hair Shulamite”

mythological or biblical references (Shulamite refers to the heroine in the Song of Solomon)

historical subject or location (a Nazi Memorial Hall in Berlin).

suggestive of an oven (immediately bringing to mind the hyperactivity of the crematoria at the Nazi death camps)

transformed architecture meant to honor Nazi heroes into a memorial for their victims.

Space ambiguous: deep space and no perspective at the same time

In and out of focus

Nazi Guard tower

Brought new life into the 1980’s art scene in NY for viewers “starved by the lean visual diet of Minimalism and Conceptualism”

Grand scale, thematic, reviving religious and cultural archetypes

Incorporated three dimensions into a flat surface

Themes of love, death, and violence

Black and white charcoal drawings

Agony or ecstasy, dying or dancing

Drawing sequences in the form of friezes or scroll painting—up to  180 feet

Women from all eras and cultures

Dancers from ancient Greek vases, etc.

Printmaking, collage

 almost like a map of the range of human experience from birth to aging, war, and rape, to a celebratory dance of life—but depicted through images of women

1000s of chalk drawings done quickly in panels from which an advertising poster had been removed (like a blackboard)

Distinctive vocabulary of cartoon figures

Started Pop Shop to sell t-shirts and pins—brought art to the masses

Politically active—donated art for AIDS organizations

Alchemy=reference to alchemy of jazz

Ornithology=nod to jazz musician Charlie Parker, nicknamed “Bird”

Ear=allusion to musical instinct

Raw energy of improv jazz; also 1980’s hip-hop

Appropriates motifs, styles, and ideas from different periods

Reflects importance artists were increasingly giving to racial and ethnic identities

Capitalized on artifice

Contracts out the actual labor of making objects

Explores the relationship of fine art to mass culture

Interested in issues of taste and how art functions as a commodity (like Andy Warhol)

Explores differences between fine art and “low” art—kitsch

Looks like mass-produced gift shop figurine, but life size (porcelain)

Captures and parodies the glitz of celebrity promotion

Also suggests fragility and impermanence—temporary nature of life and fame

Influences of Duchamp, Warhol, and Postmodern deconstruction

100 million hand painted sunflower seeds (Tate Modern)

Flattened metal claps and bottleneck foil of liquor bottles woven together with copper wire

Aluminum mosaics; hard metal visually transformed into something soft

Reminder of the liquor European traders brought to Africa as barter; reference to trade, commodity

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has now acquired two of Anatsui’s metal wall hangings, but they are owned by two different curatorial departments: the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, and Modern and Contemporary Art. Both were recently on view at the same time, but in separate galleries. Visitors, students, and art historians should continue to ask themselves which designation seems more appropriate, and for what reasons. Should we understand his art as a product of its place, its time, or both? What do we see in Anatsui’s work when it is placed among African masks and ritual objects, and how do our impressions change when this work is placed beside contemporary art from around the world?

Puerto Rico

Japanese