- Rococo: Fantasy, flirtation, licentiousness (cupid), pastel colors, private scene, lush landscape

- Born in Switzerland, studied in Rome, moved to London in 1766; friends with Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy founded 1768, and was a founding member (one of only two women admitted into the academy before the 20^th century; only female history painter of 18^th century

- Story from Roman history (only female history painter of 18^th century; not content to paint portraits or still-lifes (most women did not have her opportunities)

- Visiting friend is showing off her jewelry to Cornelia Gracchus and asks to see her jewels; Cornelia points to her children and says “These are my jewels.” (Her sons became great politicians)

- Cornelia not just famous for motherhood but was one of the most powerful women in the history of the Roman Republic; model for Kauffman;

- Popular subject; new interest in the importance of the family unit; Enlightenment teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who advocated that parents should nurture their children at home rather than sending them off to wet nurses and nannies until they were adolescents.

- Neoclassical elements: Planarity (shallow space), Linearity (but softer than David), tight brushwork, even lighting, sculptural forms, Classical figures and themes (and dress), moralistic/virtuous subject

- Austere; bare floors and walls; but delicate version of neoclassicism

- Self portrait asleep at desk; imagination needs to be united with reason (Blake thought reason stifled imagination)

- Like Blake, Goya becomes visionary;

- Suffered illness in 1798 and became deaf; had a horrible buzzing in his ear; eventually went mad

- Goya favored social reform, but then the Enlightenment became associated with revolution rather than reform, and Spain went to war with France;

- Goya became ill and barely survived, going deaf in the process

- Geometric block=reason; owls and bats=folly, ignorance

- Logical vs. emotional, illogical; relate to out-of-control events

- Many of the prints in the Caprichos series express disdain for the pre-Enlightenment practices still popular in Spain at the end of the Eighteenth century (a powerful clergy, arranged marriages, superstition, etc.). Goya uses the series to critique contemporary Spanish society.

- The full epigraph for caprichio No. 43 is: "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."

- Subject? 2 workers he met outside of town pounding stones to make gravel;

- How would neoclassicists have portrayed this scene? Romanticists? How have we seen people at work before? (Limbourg Brothers, Brueghel); no references to past art

- Realist: inelegant, unidealized (ragged clothes, dirty; he paints what he sees; but is there any commentary? (painted only one year after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto)

- Young and old—you will stay in the class you were born into all your life

- Same attention to the rocks as the faces; all rough, equal detail

- Common people noble and important, worthy of “history painting”

- The painting was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1850. It was destroyed during World War II, along with 154 other pictures, when a transport vehicle moving the pictures to the castle of Königstein, near Dresden, was bombed by Allied forces in February 1945.^[2]

- Color photography was invented in 1907, but it wasn’t until 1935 that it became popular.

- Participated in first and third Impressionist shows; Pissarro became his mentor (like a father to me)

- Always interested in form, structure; wanted to “make of Impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art in the museums”

- Visual poems (not illustrations); evoke world of Poe’s imagination

- Soft, hazy, indistinct

- Balloon morphs into a hairy eyeball, head severed at the nose

- Life, death, eternity; uncertainty, troubling

- "...at 15 I painted like Velazquez, and it took me 80 years to paint like a child."

- 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?

somber calm; stoic; rational, physical world showing spiritual, eternal ideals

- Restraint, order imposed even on nature

- John identified by eagle

- Shows fall of different civilizations; Christianity will not fall (John is writing book of Revelation about apocalypse)

- Places to rest in foreground, middle ground, background

- Difference from Poussin landscape? Still classical, but revels in beauty of nature; not moralizing; more luscious, atmospheric

- Idyllic: glowing color, light; soft transition between foreground, middle ground, and background; poetic (did sketches outdoors)

- Also spent most of life in Rome, liked the countryside; made lots of drawings on site; also first artist known to have made oil studies outside

- Still composed landscapes like Poussin; not interested in accuracy but in poetic quality; often based on ancient writings

- Hazy atmosphere, How does he show space? gradual receding into space (but can identify foreground, middle ground, and background)

- Elevated the status of landscape painting by adding historical, biblical, and mythological subjects

- France was Catholic: emphasis on natural virtue and on Eucharist

- Loved to dance and wanted to show off his shapely legs; big hair, huge column and drapery; nobody else in picture

- So popular that Rigaud had many copies made in his studio; one at Getty Museum in LA

- Louis XIV established the French Academy

- Huge scale, repetition of form (strong order), classical forms=Baroque classicism; revival of ancient architecture but considered to surpass Romans (the ancients did not have all our rules)

- Inside a huge room 240 feet in length

- opulence and grand scale on interior (not so much restraint; king’s desire for lavishness)

- Mirrors were extravagant; reflected outdoors as well as interior light

- 10 miles outside Paris

- 15,000 acres of formal gardens; wall around it 27 miles long (king’s desire to rule even over nature; taming nature—ordered, geometric, manicured hedges, fountains)

- Critic (member of the court): “The violence everywhere done to nature repels and wearies us despite ourselves”

- Mom: impressive but cold

- Wanted to have the best and most beautiful of everything—aim for perfection

- Rococo: intimate

- Associated with France but style spread

- French Academy: two factions: Poussinistes vs. Rubenistes; line vs. color (started with Michelangelo/Titian; then Poussin/Rubens)

  - Poussin: line appealed to the mind and is superior to color, which appealed to the senses;

  - Rubenistes: color is truer to nature and appeals to everyone; line appeals only to the expert few; (Rubenistes win out)

- Music: Baroque composers Vivaldi, Bach, Handel

- Theme: Fashionable, Flamboyant, Flirtatious, Frivolous, and French

- Opulent, decorative, highly detailed, gold and pastels

- Rococo comes from word “rocaille”—shells and pebbles used for inlaid decorations

- Salon—place for intimate gatherings full of witty conversation

- Artifice valued

- Social suicide: enthusiasm and sincerity

- Posted outside of his friend’s art gallery

- Watteau’s last work (died soon afterwards of tuberculosis)

- People admired natural, elegant poses of figures, satin and fabrics

- Portrait of Louis XIV being put in crate (he just passed away; out with the old)

- Appealed to sophistication: art collectors, artists, mirrors, clocks

- Poussinistes vs. Rubenistes

- Which side won the day? Colorists

- Loved Rubens; made many drawings after his style; sensual use of color; adds golden haze

- Started career painting sets for theater; most of his works have quality of being on stage (like a dance)

- Idyllic images of aristocratic life; elegant figures luxuriously dressed in outdoor settings (back to the Limbourg brothers book of hours)

- Subject: not historical or mythological; didn’t fit categories at French Academy, so they created a new category of painting: fetes galantes—scenes of love, sentimentality, melancholy

- Cythera=island of love in classical mythology, one of the settings for the birth of Aphrodite/Venus

- Are they arriving or leaving? About to board boat? Looking back, melancholy, nostalgia

- Sculpture of Venus on right; they pay homage to her; delicate colors suggest gentle nature of lovers’ relationships; subtle gradations of tone

- Figures smaller in scale than most Baroque

- After Watteau’s death, his art fell out of fashion. During the French Revolution, some eighty years after the work was painted, his depictions of lavishly set pastoral escapades were associated with the old days of the monarchy and a frivolous aristocracy. This particular piece, which had entered the collection of the Louvre in 1795, was used by art students for target practice; an account by Pierre Bergeret (1782–1863) describes the drawing students throwing bread pellets at it.^[3] In the early 19th century the curator at the Louvre was forced to place it in storage until 1816 in order to protect the painting from angry protesters. It was not until the 1830s that Watteau and the Rococo returned into fashion.

- Drawing technique with 3 colors of chalk: black, red, and white

- Informal strokes

- Studied with Watteau;  compare faces

- court painter to Madame de Pompadour—Louis XV’s mistress and political advisor and major patron of the arts; known for being educated, cultured, beautiful, elegant, sophisticated;

- Luxurious room, opulent dress, surrounded by accomplishments as an educated woman (books, papers)

Rococo: pastel colors, opulence, leisurely pose, aristocratic taste; also seductive (references to Venus: cupid, roses)

- Artfinder (Art of the Day): This sumptuous portrait embodies the joie de vivre of the French Rococo style in general and Boucher’s style in particular: the cool harmony of colors, luminous effect, and conspicuous leisure. Here the sumptuously attired mistress of Louis XV is depicted reclining gracefully on a pillow-strewn divan. The model of physical perfection, she is also the embodiment of style and cultivation. The drawings, books, maps, and writing instruments allude to her considerable intellectual gifts and interests. One of many portraits Boucher painted of Pompadour, this celebrates her official elevation as lady-in-waiting to her lover’s wife.

- From Venice, known for showing psychological intensity of sitters, international clientele; member of 3 artist academies including French Academy

- Virtues of hard work, frugality, honesty, family life

- Bubbles: vanitas symbol: brevity of life

- Rococo: intimate, private moment; also play

- National Gallery, Washington D.C./ Version in LACMA

- Different tone than French Rococo! About aristocracy but painted for lower classes; laughing at foibles of aristocracy; moral but also humorous

- English painter; satire paintings of social evils popular among aristocracy and newly prosperous middle class in England; “modern moral subjects . . .similar to representations on the stage.” depicted moral decline, call for return to simpler times and values; very popular; master of storytelling details.

- Series were engraved and sold in large editions; first copyright laws emerged because pirated;

- Lower classes had access; Hogarth knew they were his audience

- Set in Rose Tavern, a famous brothel in London; full of visual clues (woman on his lap stealing his watch; black spots on their faces cover sores from syphilis) “ancestor to the storyboard” for films

- Engraving: became wealthy through the sale of his prints

- Logic and morality

- Theme: “Return to Reason”

- Age of Enlightenment

- Praised “noble simplicity” and “calm grandeur” of ancient art

- The Grand Tour gave concrete form to northern Europeans’ ideas about the Greco-Roman world and helped foster Neoclassical ideals. The most ambitious tourists visited excavations at such sites as Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Tivoli, and purchased antiquities to decorate their homes

- 13’, in the Louvre;

- Painted while in Rome; came in contact with Mengs, Winckelmann, Hamilton and admired their work; this work became immediate sensation

- Roman story: border dispute between Rome and neighboring Alba settled by a sword fight involving three soldiers from each side: Horatii brothers for Rome and Curiatii brothers for Alba; a Horatii sister was engaged to a Curiatii brother, and a Horatii brother was married to a Curiatii sister;

- Scene: The Horatii, led by father, take a vow to fight to the death for their country

- Compare with Boucher (next slide): What is neoclassical? Composition simple and striking; hard lines; austere space; stark columns (Tuscan Doric) firm stance contrasted with mourning women

- Noble and virtuous action; country above personal feelings for family

- Neoclassical elements: Planarity, Linearity (sharp lines), tight brushwork, sculptural forms, Classical figures (sculpturally rendered) and themes (also clarity), moralistic subject; strong men, weak women (common depiction at the time)

- Austere; bare floors and walls/ Doric columns and arches show Roman setting and frame each grouping

- Lighting: harsh light casts precise shadows (influenced by Caravaggio)

- Setting and costumes carefully researched

- Integrated message with style

- Quintessential Neoclassical picture, but horror of impending violence, bloodbath—undercurrents of Romanticism

- Influential in start of French Revolution (although David wasn’t a revolutionary at the time he painted it)

by 1791 became active in the cause of French Revolution (began in 1789); painter for the Revolution and for the new regime afterwards

- His most famous portrait of the period;  a leader of the revolution and a close friend of David;

- Marat was dedicated revolutionary; ruthless; a counterrevolutionary named Charlotte Corday brought him a fake petition and plunged a knife into his chest while he was reading it

- Portable desk laid across his bathtub, where he spent most of his time due to  a lethal skin condition

- Stark, (like Zurburan); attention to detail, sharp lighting (but not accurate; his bathroom was quite lavish, and Marat was unattractive in life); writing crate like a tombstone, Marat like poses of Christ

- Planarity—in our face; horrific; also personal intensity (signature) Romantic (and idealization; not accurate; his bathroom was quite lavish, and Marat was unattractive in life; propaganda)

- Qualities of Baroque: In our face: bloody knife; heroic martyr

- Sir Joshua Reynolds in black (left); president

- Zoffany (the artist) on very left with palette and brush

- Two male models

- Portraits on the right? Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, two founding members

- Kauffmann largely responsible for the popularizing of Neoclassicism in England, and Moser’s reputation at the time rivaled Kauffmann’s

- “There is clearly no place for the two female academicians in the discussion about art which is taking place here. Women were barred from the study of the nude model which formed the basis for academic training and representation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.”

- They have become objects of art rather than its producers; like the plaster casts and relief sculptures, they are the objects of contemplation and inspiration for the male artists.

- Shows in a nutshell the difficulties women have had throughout the ages in a male-dominated art world; nothing to do with their intelligence, skill, etc

- spirit of empiricism; studied nature; specialized in portraiture and depicted major thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Diderot, Rousseau, Louis XVI, Catherine II of Russia, and Benjamin Franklin;

- Captured look and character of sitter

- Terra-cotta cast from original plaster (one in LACMA)

- Empiricism: sagging skin on neck, sunken mouth (toothless), slumping shoulders

- Character: shows sharp intellect and wit, lively in spirit although weak in body

- Classicized: Roman toga and headband, antique-style chair

- White House, Capitol building; also churches, banks, government buildings

- Thomas Jefferson amateur architect; designed his home (Monticello)

- Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770: history paintings should be historically accurate; so should contemporary history painting

- British painter (American): raised outside Philadelphia; went to Rome in 1760 and studied with Mengs, Gavin Hamilton, studied ancient art and Raphael; settled in London in 1763, also a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768 and became 2^nd president when Joshua Reynolds died; mentor for American artists and proud of his new world heritage; supported the American Revolution

- Depiction of French and Indian War in Quebec; not classical in subject or costumes, but in spirit; General Wolfe a British national hero  at the moment he sacrificed his life for his country; contemporary costume and setting in Quebec (although not really historically correct); pose like images of Christ; shift of emotions from religion to nationalism

- forces of nature reinforce emotional intensity

- Public loved: witnessing current events (7 years earlier) before photography and film; also native American (noble savage)

Salon: exhibition of members of the Royal Academy held in the Louvre; packed with paintings, attended by thousands of people from all classes of society; beginning of art critics

Neoclassical: virtuous, family life (neat, modest, hard-working, religious); lower class (Rousseau: poor are full of natural virtue, honest sentiment)

- Corresponded with ideals of Rousseau: naïve poor are closer to nature and are thus more virtuous and moral than more cultivated aristocracy

- People felt gestures and emotions were very authentic (compare to Poussin)

- Self taught because she was denied access to the Royal Academy; began painting portraits in her teens, but illegal because she didn’t have a license from the academy;

- Married a painter and art dealer who gave her powerful contacts; became a favorite portraitist of Queen Marie-Antoinette; because of the queen’s influence, she was accepted into the Royal Academy in 1783

- Reflects taste for classical (togas, Roman-style hairdo and headband; austere wall); life has begun to imitate art!

- Also showed ideal of Rousseau—greater parental involvement in child-rearing (young children started showing up more in portraiture with their parents); still Rococo influence; soft contours, curvilinear patterns

- Francisco Goya, The Family of Charles IV, 1800 (Emily Capra, Natalie Fisher, Liza Wilson)

- Propaganda to affirm family’s divine privilege and superiority?

- Exposes their ordinariness

- Goya meant it to be compared with Las Meninas (artist at easel); everyone in court would know it; Queen Maria Luisa strikes same pose as Velazquez’s infanta

- What are they looking at? Mirror—missing element

- Awkwardness; uncomfortable

- Dynamic handling of paint on clothes, jewelry, medals; Charles IV did not reject painting

- Vivid portrayal of brutalities; indictment against French troops

- RECENT past; even more contemporary than Benjamin West’s; precedent to photojournalism

- Comment on what happens when people lose control of reason

- Church in background—why?

- Indebted to Baroque: strong contrast in light for impact

- Anonymous nobodies; Christ-like figure, but shows their fear

- Compare with Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784

- Clearly structured pattern of light and dark gives impact (Caravaggio influence)

- Firing squad: faceless, mechanical uniformity

- Not heroic; protest against war

- Real event, but universal in significance

- Symbols of incomprehensible cruelty; fascination with irrational

- Prophecy that one of Saturn’s sons would dethrone him

- Jupiter/Zeus escaped and prophecy came true

- Corrupt power; power turning on one’s own (Napoleon)

- Flesh/meat/bone quality of figures

- Depicted world of dreams, gave form to fantasy (Freud owned one of his paintings)

- Sublime terror; ignores what paintings are supposed to be about

- Incubus=evil spirit

- Swiss; was a minister but left to become an artist; Fuseli interested in psychology, the concept of the antihero (one who follows personal passions to attain freedom and fulfill individual needs)

- Studied in Rome but dismissed Winckelmann’s adulation of the calm grandeur and noble simplicity of Greek sculpture and the perfect harmony of High Renaissance

- Gravitated to Michelangelo’s twisting, muscular figures on Sistine Chapel ceiling and Last Judgment and admired distortions of Mannerists

- (Thor dies from serpent’s poison); story from German equivalent of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Norse epic instead of Greek mythology (Odin hovers above)

- Neoclassic planarity? tight drawing? consistent lighting? smooth handling of paint? None

- Dramatic light, loose brushwork, dramatic composition with extreme angles (foreshortening); we are on level with serpent; feel stormy water, chill, fear

- Romanticism: horrific theme, violence, forces of nature; turn to fantasy world when life is too mechanized (Industrial Revolution)—similar to today—Iron Man, Star Wars, etc.

- Poet and artist from England; sought spirituality and felt divinely inspired, goal to explain reason for existence (who are we, why we are here);

- Wrote in a letter to artist John Flaxman that his mind was filled with “books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life.” (Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Letters of William Blake, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968, 41-42) quoted in The God Who Weeps, by Terryl and Fiona Givens

- Critic of European materialism, lack of spirituality, inequality of women; also felt the Enlightenment had failed because of reign of terror after French Revolution

- Joined Royal Academy in 1779 but felt it repressed imagination, creativity; not acclaimed in his lifetime for art (but was well-known for his poetry)

- Shunned oil painting (too much associated with academy); monotype (in book)

- looked to medieval manuscript painting for inspiration

- Elohim creating Adam: painful ( pose like Christ on cross); compare with Michelangelo

- Elohim is a Hebrew name for God. This picture illustrates the Book of Genesis:

- Landscape painting; need to escape growing effects of Industrial Revolution in England, search for truth

- Suffolk County; previously considered too ordinary to be subject matter for a painting; new national pride

- Constable admired Claude Lorrain, loved nature; considered painting a science (close observation)

- Did numerous oil sketches outdoors, but completed painting in studio; large—6-foot canvas; strategy for elevating landscape to a higher status

- Attention to intangibles: light, weather, atmosphere

- The Haywain in Paris exhibition in 1824; French artists very impressed; Delacroix said to have been so inspired he repainted sky in one of his works

- New vibrance through sky, light, weather; Flecks of white to suggest shimmering light, broken color

- Focuses on wonder of ordinary, humble settings, but not idealized or classical

- Details: dog, boat, harvesters in distant field, puffs of smoke coming from mill; doesn’t show financial pressure on the Constable property, new way of life taking over (already nostalgic?)

- Also interested in atmosphere, light but more expressive

- Looked to great landscape painters of the past and tried to outdo them; penchant for spectacular, grandiose; turned landscapes into mythological and historical paintings on epic scale;

- Hannibal: from Carthage led troops across French alps in 218 B.C. to launch a surprise attack on the Romans

- “human sea of turmoil” (looks like Moses parting Red Sea); Hannibal in right corner on elephant; insignificant to wild storm; dramatic light and dark

- Reference to Napoleon’s 1800 march across Alps to invade Italy? Theme: folly of empire building; human activity insignificant compared to sublime universal forces (less interested in reproducing a specific landscape)

- Helped to inspire French Impressionists

- Sublime: something in nature that evokes awe, wonder, fear

Review the Tate’s website, The Art of the Sublime and then post a comment to the discussion board that relates an idea or a painting on this site to a personal experience of the sublime that you have experienced. Your post should be substantive and descriptive. Discuss the meaning of the word “sublime” in relation to your own experiences. Once you have posted your statement on the sublime, be sure to read what others have posted and comment on at least a few of these.

- Small figure of monk dwarfed by landscape; insignificant; Industrial Revolution—man taming nature; here, shows nature can’t be controlled;

- Sublime: landscape is beautiful, awesome, terrifying; God’s presence shown in nature rather than in a church (monk worships outside)

- Influenced by Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten, theologian who delivered sermons on the shores of the Baltic Sea

- I learned a lot in this in this class, but one of the biggest things for me was a word. A word I've been looking for for awhile, a word for a feeling I've felt almost all my life and am just now beginning to understand, a feeling I didn't even think had a name. The sublime. We've seen so many beautiful works of art this semester, but I'm choosing this one. Not because it's my favorite artwork-wise, but because I feel it. It shows a small monk dwarfed by the majesty of the sea. Nature is beautiful, terrifying. It is God's creation and is a temple to him in its own right. I love nature. I feel more at peace surrounded my trees than anywhere else. There is something so spiritual about it, and I feel things so deeply there that I cannot put them into woods. That's why this piece is beautiful to me. - Morgan Hatmaker

- companion piece to Monk by the Sea: What is the mood? Silent, bleak; somber sky at twilight, cold (winter); everything dead or dying

- What kind of abbey is this? Medieval, crumbling—age past; human achievement crumbling; funeral procession—thought to be of monk above; how significant are the people? What is more significant? Nature outlives achievements of man;

- Any hope? New Moon: symbol of waxing/waning/rebirth? Morning will come, spring will come, Resurrection (crosses)

- Sublime: awesome, frightening force of nature—wants us to see God’s presence in nature (more than in the church?)

- Compare with Turner (above): Similar force of nature but dissimilar in style: Friedrich is more detailed, harder lines; linear vs. painterly

- Landscape is a metaphor for transience of life, human achievement

- Nationalism: part of Romantic movement; Herder collected folk songs and made anthology, Grimm brothers collected folk tales; searching shared past united people more than an allegiance to an aristocracy;

- No Germany in 1810; loose union of about 300 German-speaking states

- Hopes for unification crushed under Napoleon’s rule; oaks and Gothic abbey (Goethe said Gothic architecture originated in Germany) symbols of demise of nationalism; reflection of the national mood, national crisis

- In the early 1800’s art academies established in Pennsylvania, Boston, and NY

- Struggle to find own national identity, separate from European roots: no churches of past like Europe;

- Decided that the land itself was America’s spiritual heritage, unspoiled compared to Europe (overpopulated), full of natural resources;

- Landscape became national symbol (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

- America’s first art movement (1820’s) called Hudson River School (traveled along Hudson River Valley, made studies, and finished paintings in NY studios)

- Oxbow made for exhibition at the National Academy of Design (he was a founding member)

- Sublime? Blasted trees, storm; juxtaposed with cultivated fields (in harmony with nature?)

- Human presence? (Cole by parasol)

- Letters in hill spell Noah; upside down, Shaddai (Hebrew for Almighty)

- Dead trees & seedlings: cycle of life, death, resurrection (similar symbol of Friedrich; mood? Optimistic)

- American Transcendentalist movement: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836), Henry David Thoreaus’ Walden (1852)

- But Cole already found the destruction of wilderness and lack of respect for the land disheartening; early environmentalist, wanted to keep landscape pure and live in harmony with the land; painted a cycle of 5 pictures called “The Course of Empire”:

- Same site: Primitive, agrarian society, thriving empire, decadent empire, and state of ruin

- Edo was the name for Tokyo; residence of the emperor

- Ukiyo-e school of painting (“floating world”); refers to the transience of material existence

- Popular subjects: theater, dance, courtesans, everyday tasks, leisure, landscape and cityscapes, beautiful women

- Linear details on face; almost no shading

- 3D forms? Created by contours, overlapping, foreshortening

- Impressionist artists were astounded by it; Debussy said this image inspired his famous composition La Mer

- From the series 36 views of Mt. Fuji

displays the influence of Dutch art prints that came to Japan via western trade: his own form of linear perspective, low horizon line and the distinctive European color, Prussian blue.

- All of the images in the series feature a glimpse of the mountain

- Full of visual play; the mountain, made tiny by the use of perspective, appears as if it too will be swallowed up by the wave. Hokusai’s optical play can also be lighthearted, and the spray from top of the crashing wave looks like snow falling on the mountain

- Mt. Fuji framed; wave creates a diagonal line leading our eye to its peak

- Mount Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan and has long been considered sacred

- interested in oblique angles, contrasts of near and far, and contrasts of manmade and the natural

- Birds’ eye view

- Ukiyo-e, which originated as a Buddhist term, means "floating world" and refers to the impermanence of the world.

- emphasis on line and pure, bright color, as well as their ability to distill form down to the minimum.

- moved away from the tradition of making images of courtesans and actors, which was the customary subject of ukiyo-e prints. Instead, his work focused on the daily life of Japanese people from a variety of social levels. 

- 1867 International Exposition in Paris, Hokusai’s work was on view at the Japanese pavilion. This was the first introduction of Japanese culture to mass audiences in the West, and a craze for collecting art called Japonisme ensued. 

- The breathtaking composition of this woodblock print, said to have inspired Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea) and Rilke’s Der Berg (The Mountain), ensures its reputation as an icon of world art. Hokusai cleverly played with perspective to make Japan’s grandest mountain appear as a small triangular mound within the hollow of the cresting wave. The artist became famous for his landscapes created using a palette of indigo and imported Prussian blue.

- Look for unity in the composition:

- Repetition of shape, color, pattern (triangle of mountain, curves of boats, pattern in waves and crests)

- Creates harmony in what could be a chaotic scene; harmony in nature

- Japanese prints: influenced by flat shapes, sharp contours, compressed space, cropping, angles

- flat shapes
- sharp contours
- compressed space
- cropping
- angles
- assymetry

- Emphasis on ordinary, everyday, modern experience; neither idealized nor dramatized

- Championed laborers and common people

- New tin tubes of oil paint

- Started having individual art exhibits (independent of art academies)

- Doesn’t look radical, but idea was radical

- Realism=real life

- Accepted at the Salon in 1850, people criticized because of common people, common clothing, common setting; dog

- Whose funeral? We don’t even know. Just reporting the scene

- “history painting” about real life. “Show me an angel and I’ll paint one.”

- Monumental paintings used to be religious or mythological: Courbet thought average, everyday people worthy of monumental painting

- Not even a story, like Raft of Medusa

- Also showed at 1850 Salon

- Studied with her father—drawing instructor and socialist who advocated full equality for women

- Determined to be a successful artist; worked on a large scale

- Technical finesse: scientific detail of farm animals, specific species

- Not exotic animals of Romanticism, no moral of neoclassicism; end of hierarchy of subject matter

- Looks photographic—very detailed, close brushwork

- Slow, weighty visual rhythm highlights hard physical nature of their task

- Hiroshige’s last series was entitled One Hundred Views of Edo

- Travelers and merchants

- Busy street seen from an elevated vantage point appealed to Impressionist artists

- Realism in America

- From Philadelphia; Post-Civil War America: Studied in Paris in the late 1860’s, returned to US

- like Impressionists, painted middle-class leisure activities, popular sports, and surgery clinics

- Sculling pictures: heroes of modern life

- Carefully reproduced outdoor scene (not quickly recorded like Impressionists); several sketches of sculls and oars to get perspective right; studied light effects and anatomy; minute details (REALISM)

- He was also an avid rower and depicted himself in the scull in the background

- Had students (even women) work from nude models rather than plaster casts;

- Well dressed, perfect manners, kept up with current events, hung out at cafes to keep abreast of new ideas; broke artistic conventions

- Edouard Manet, The Luncheon on the Grass, 1863:

- Not accepted at the Salon in 1863; Louis Napoleon set up a Salon for the rejected pieces in a separate bldg, and Manet agreed to show it there (even though people came to mock the rejects);

- Why scandalous?

- Subject: Contemporary scene of well-dressed men with nude woman (no allegory, history, or mythology);

- But acknowledged that it was inspired by Titian, Raphael

- Style: Looked unfinished; flat shapes (like Japanese prints); unconvincing space (woman hovers above) ; we look at painting rather than through or into (no more window onto nature from Renaissance)

- References to Titian, Raphael. Raimondi, engraving after Raphael, Judgment of Paris

- With cities comes the chance to interact with strangers

- Some artists straddled styles; Pissarro became a post-Impressionist; Manet never took part in any  of the Impressionist shows, but he adopted brighter colors of Impressionists; remained enigmatic; different interpretations

- A 2^nd-floor bar, overlooking the main floor below; complicated, different illusions

- Upper left: woman on a trapeze

- Mirror: reflects scene in front of barmaid; but barmaid is real, not a reflection; she looks empty; her reflection is distorted (suggestion that the man is making a proposition to her? Would explain distortion: 2 identities)

- Everyone is having a good time but the main person: illusion of gaiety, but she is alienated; modern life not so perfect; money can’t buy happiness (Folies-Bergere expensive restaurant, catered to wealthy).

- No one cares about this girl at the bar’s eyes. They see her costume which reveals what she does, they see the drinks which reveal how she can serve them tonight, and they see the flower on her bodice which reveals her expertise. She is completely objectified by her blind society. And yes, she may have chosen the profession, she may have put on the dress, she may have come to work that night, but her eyes reveal it’s all wrong.

- In To Kill a Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee in the mid-1950s, Atticus says, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” The truth in this quote, written with a very different context in mind, mirrors the truth in this painting, as I see it. Manet gave me a chance to walk around in this girl at the bar’s skin. And though the subject, according to the title, is the bar itself and not the girl at all, I still thank him for snapshotting the truth of this one era, by depicting the eyes of one likely fictitious girl, when popular values weren’t always real.

- Unglamourous poses

- Cropped figures suggest candid viewpoint

- Tipped up floors and assymetry of Japanese prints

- Potential instability is anchored by verticals

- soft, loose skirts contrast with dark hair; red repeated across the canvas to unify

- Oil on canvas

- Clue to what Monet is all about: worked out of doors not just to make sketches but to make his finished paintings

- Monet influenced by Corot to work out of doors, as well as a local landscape painter named Boudin; new paint in tubes made this possible

- Bold brushwork;

- Color theory of optical mixing: Brushstrokes of color blend optically; colors brighter, sunny (like Corot);

- Shadows not black

- "When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here is an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own naïve impression of the scene before you.” ( to Lila Cabot Perry)

- Impressionisms said they painted truth

- The name Impressionism comes from this work; derogatory term by a critic at the first Impressionist exhibition taken from the title; just impressions, not finished paintings; looked sketchy, unfinished

- Shares characteristics with Realism: contemporary subjects, flat/unfinished look, record of the moment

- Different: more about the nouveau riche and middle class; leisure activities

- Focused more on landscapes and cityscapes than figures

- Worked outdoors completely to record light, atmosphere

- Rather than painting objects, they painted the colored light that reflected off objects

- Painted what they saw, not what they knew (scientific)

- Monet said himself that “it really couldn’t pass for a view of Le Havre”

- Monet also liked to show modern city life; made 10 paintings of this train shed to record busy people and grand new apartments behind; We can feel the steam and dampness, atmosphere

- Would change canvas as the light changed

- Rented out the area where he painted

- Was really fascinated with how light changes

- This is a set of 9

- He would get in a boat with 9 canvas and switch every 7 minutes

- Friend of Monet; often painted side by side

- Also liked to show modern life but especially loved painting people in social settings

- Social life of young leisure class, emphasis on people rather than landscape

- Flickering, transitory light

- Popular restaurant for boaters; we can identify class by their hats; models were Renoir’s friends (he married the girl with the dog)

- Dappled sunlight, momentary (also like photographs—people cropped, girl drinking)

- Renoir started to model more; wanted to  go back to stronger line and drawing

- “It is after lunch in Renoir’s new world of painters, patrons and acresses, and everyone is a friend. Models smoke, drink and talk amongst the detritus of the empty bottles and the meal left on the tables. There are no rules or regulations here.” Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes, Picador, 2010, 81

- The acress ellen Andree raises her glass to her lips. Baron Raoul Barbier, a former mayor of colonial Saigon, his brown bowler pushed back, talks to the young daughter of the proprietor. Her brother, straw-hatted like a professional oarsman, stands in the foreground surveying the lunch. Caillebotte, relaxed and fit in a white singlet and boater, sits astride his chair looking at the young seamstress Aline Charigot, Renoir’s lover and future wife. The artist Paul Lhote sits with a proprietorial arm around the actress around the actress Jeanne Samary.” (see notes above)

- And Charles is there. He is the man at the very back, in the top hat and black suit, turning slightly away, seen glancingly. You can just see his red-brown beard. He is talking with a pleasantly open-faced, poorly shaved Laforgue, dressed as a proper poet in a working man’s cap and what could even be a corduroy jacket.”

- Proust—notes a “gentleman . . . Wearing a top hat at a boating party where he was clearly out of place, which proved that . . . He was not only a regular sitter, but a friend, perhaps a patron.”

- 10 years older than the others; father figure to Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists

- Influenced by Corot, Courbet

- Lived in country instead of city; preferred painting peasants and farms to city dwellers and social life

- He was in all 6 of the impressionist shows

- Took part in all 8 Impressionist shows (only one to do all 8)

- Painted outdoors like Monet

- Emphasized abstract qualities; complex, structured compositions (compare with Impression: Sunrise); influenced later artists (Cezanne, Picasso); Cezanne said Pissarro was a father figure to him and a little like the Lord himself.

- American, trained in Philadelphia and then convinced her father to let her study in France; accepted in Salon exhibitions; became good friends with Degas and joined Impressionist group

- New attention to child rearing in France, as well as women’s rights in France; agenda for better education for women

- Bathing regularly was a new phenomenon

- Emotional and physical involvement; also reminiscent of Madonna and child paintings of the Renaissance; importance of women’s role in society

- High viewpoint like Japanese prints; also strong forms and contours

- She and her sister Edna studied painting (women couldn’t attend French Academy, so they sought out other artists to teach them); studied with Corot; both had works accepted in Salon of 1864

- Became close friends with Manet and married Manet’s brother, in Impressionist group from the beginning; focused on life of French middle class

- Berthe’s sister and baby; painted women and children (models most readily available); not frivolous; meditative and thoughtful

- pastel colors

- Wealthy women’s activities: gathering flowers, taking tea, child-rearing, reading, sewing, vacationing

- Flickering paint, bold brushstrokes, strong diagonal (like Degas, Japanese prints)

- Interest in capturing:
everyday subjects
on-the-spot outdoor scenes
 fleeting moments, impermanence
atmosphere, light, colored shadow
modern urban life, leisure activities
middle class/nouveau riche
times of day/year

- Very religious, came from a poor working-class family

- Victorian morals;

- Inspired by a passage in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield

- Prostitution in the city; perceived as only hope of bettering their situation

- Woman becomes aware of the lyrics of the song they are singing, returns to her family

- Cluttered with objects of consumerism, also cluttered with details

- Compare with Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, which was in collection of National Gallery in London in 1842

- Symbolism like Van Eyck: cat and bird (kept woman’s position); clock: almost 12 (little time left for action); window reflected in mirror: freedom, beauty and simplicity of nature, freedom

- Biblical passages on bottom

- Christ has received a wound in his hand and is comforted by Joseph and Mary

- Disguised symbols of future role as Jesus as Savior: cut in his hand=wounds from the nails, John the Baptist (right) carries bowl symbolizing baptism (his future role); flock of sheep outside=Christ’s role as Good Shepherd; nails, tools on wall/ladder= crucifixion; dove=Holy Ghost; triangle=trinity

- Social statement: supports quality workmanship and labor instead of poorly-crafted, mass-produced products of Industrial Revolution

- Identifies Christ with working class: dirt under the fingernails (like Courbet did with the stonebreakers)

- Realistic detail: went to carpenter’s shop to study wood shavings and musculature of a carpenter

- John Ruskin writer, artist championed PRB and urged creation of beautifully designed, hand crafted objects that workers could take pride in producing over mass-produced products;

- Morris started company that manufactured beautifully crafted fabrics, wallpaper, tapestries, carpets, tiles, furniture, and stained glass; he designed most of the wallpaper and fabrics

- From nature, considered spiritual

- Gold background above wainscoting=12 months of the year; like late Gothic art, cycles of seasons and life

- Emphasized truth and quality: no disguising materials, no pre-fabricated materials, no cheap materials

- Launched Arts and Crafts movement, which soon spread to the US

- helped to erase Renaissance-influenced perceptions that valued the so-called “higher” art forms over the “lower” work of traditional craftsmen.

- John Ruskin accused Whistler of “Flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

- Whistler sued him for slander:

- “By using the word 'nocturne' I wished to indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. A nocturne is an arrangement of line, form and color first”

- When Whistler was on the stand, he was questioned on the amount of time it took to finish one of the paintings.

- When Whistler replied that it took only a couple of days, the defense asked if two days of work was worth the 200-guinea price of the piece. Whistler replied, “No. I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.”

- Singer painted her in attempt to raise his reputation—no commission; received more ridicule than praise. Kept for thirty years, then sold to the MET; “I suppose it is the best thing I have done.”

- The title comes from the refrain of a popular song "Ye Shepherds Tell Me" by Joseph Mazzinghi, a pastoral glee for a trio of male voices, which mentions Flora wearing "A wreath around her head, around her head she wore, Carnation, lily, lily, rose".^[3]

- The work is set in an English garden at Farnham House in Broadway in the Cotswolds, where Sargent spent the summer of 1885 with Millet shortly after moving to England from Paris to escape the scandal caused by his 1884 painting Portrait of Madame X

- Sargent wanted to capture the exact level of light at dusk so he painted the picture en plein air – outdoors and in the Impressionist manner. Every day from September to November 1885, he painted in the few minutes when the light was perfect, giving the picture an overall purple tint of evening

- Suspension cables with vertical cables and wire cables running from piers all the way along the bridge, creating triangular units

- Revival styles: Gothic arch, piers like Roman triumphal arches (America’s Arch of Triumph): awesome scale and achievement, technological superiority

- Innovative use of iron: barrel vaults and columns on the interior; looks Romanesque, but would have felt modern because of the iron and suggestive of the train sheds, voyages, etc. (symbolic: books bridge to the future)

- Didn’t need to use iron—metaphorical purpose

- Study Question: describe the architects’ innovation in structure and use of materials and his references to earlier architectural styles

- Designed as an entrance to the 1889 Paris International Exposition

- Had constructed many bridges, used similar technology; cast iron

- 984 feet high; twice as high as any existing structure in the world at the time

- Also came to be viewed as a triumphal arch; symbol of Paris and France

- Looked very modern because it sheds historical references; new materials dictate style

- “While Realism and Impressionism had sought to capture the essence of the modern world, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau largely struggled to escape it and to provide an antidote.”

- Artists have unique vision; no mistaking one artist for another

- Patchy, “slablike” brushstrokes: make it monumental looking

- Space/Perspective? Strange perspective in dishes, tabletop climbs up the canvas; changes viewpoints

- Subject is structure, form; felt that all forms in nature were based on cones, spheres, and cylinders

- Push and pull between flat and 3-D again: leaves in wallpaper look 3-D/ table looks flat

- Cloth: shadows make it look 3-D, but strong feeling of just paint makes it look 2-D

- Representational, but acknowledges that it is first paint on a canvas; arrangement of lines and colors (like Whistler)

- Subject: still life traditions in the 17^th century: breaking rules of naturalism

- Like Impressionism: Painted outdoors, bright outdoor colors, broad brushstrokes, flickering light

- Different: structural, formal, frozen; even sky looks structural

- Push and pull between depth and flat space: brushstrokes are flat marks asserting the surface of the canvas (conflict between abstraction and representational: we know it’s a real scene, and we also know it’s a flat canvas with lines, color, and paint; no longer a window onto nature—ideal since Renaissance)

- Looks quickly done, but meticulous about every mark (each painting took a couple of years)

- looked for geometric substructure in all things; shapes echo each other (curves in tree, slope; diagonals in field, mountains, paint strokes

- Becomes increasingly abstract

- More compressed; less depth

- Balance between observation of nature and a desire to abstract nature: show things as color, shape

- Paint strokes stand on their own; Freed painting from representational role

- Had a powerful influence on Picasso and Matisse

- Felt art should be based on a scientific system

- Impressionist influence: subject (middle class leisure activities), brilliant colors, sunlight; shows social types (boatman on left corner, courtesan on right with monkey)

- Different: very controlled: firm contours, frozen formality, calm, timeless stability instead of fleeting moment (like Renaissance); structure

- Classical: figures silhouetted in profile, ¾ view, or frontally (not casual placement); said he wanted to make modern figures file past like figures on the frieze of the Parthenon;

- 6x10 feet—like monumental history painting

- Did detailed studies—like a stage set: made monumental

- Brushstoke: broken, but systematic, impersonal

- Brushstrokes became dots (theory that they would merge in the viewer’s eye and produce more luminous color than if mixed on palette (pointillism, divisionism)

- Self-portrait in back (crippled by a genetic disease; very short); Spent life in night spots of Paris, died of alcoholism

- Influence of Japanese prints: flat silhouettes, block shapes, cropping, tilted space,

- Influence of Degas: above and subject matter

- Different: more abstract, cartoonish, caricature, simplified; minimum of marks, more flat planes and outlines

- Makes very 2-D

- Moulin Rouge--Cabaret

- Dancer: Louise Weber, credited with creating the cancan

- Profile in front: “Valentin the boneless,” known for his idiosyncratic dancing

- Satirical: Appealing? Illusion of gaiety, but emptiness:

- Psychological isolation of dancer, weary expression;  lurking profile of Valentin; dark shapes of onlookers

- We can feel rhythm of the dance: repeated feet, movement, repeated words, yellow gas lamps (rhythm), lines of floorboards)

- Yellow shape on left: globes of the modern electric chandelier that hung over the dance floor

- Tried to be an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, a preacher

- Used color and brushwork to express emotion

- Wanted to “express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green”

- Symbolic use of complementary colors: makes harsh, acidic, sour (green light in waiter’s hair)

- Also tipped perspective: puts us at dis-ease; looks threatening

- Psychological isolation

- Mood?

- Emotional intensity

- Surging, rhythmic lines

- Everything in the landscape is echoed in the town:

- Cypress trees planted beside graveyards as symbols of eternal life (echoes church steeple)--spiritual

- Lit houses in rural village protected by surrounding hills

- Yellow in windows and in the stars; light, spiritual light

- Expressive: not realist or Impressionist

- People in harmony with the universe (Van Gogh’s desire); commitment to humanity

- Committed suicide 1 year later

- Studied with Pissarro; became a follower of Cezanne

- Participated in last 4 Impressionist exhibitions

- Believed art of ancient and non-western cultures had more spiritual strength

- Went to Brittany (western France) to live among peasants; seeking a simpler society in tune with nature

- Religion still part of everyday life for peasants; still wore distinctive regional costume? tried to depict their simple, direct faith through art that was direct, authentic, and free of civilized influences (perspective, shading)

- Looked at folk art, children’s art, medieval art, medieval stained glass windows

- Women have just heard a sermon about Jacob wrestling with the angel; they see a vision of the story along with a cow (spirituality in every thing—struggling shapes have shape of cow)

- Shapes reduced to flat, curvilinear, outlined areas; little shadow (like Japanese prints and stained glass)

- Background plane tilted up, flat red (mystical; felt deep space was distracting to message)

- Diagonal of apple tree like Japanese prints

- Perspective of Degas

- Hats, bonnet strings look animated

- Influenced a lot of other painters

- In Tahiti for six years, hoping to discover an unspoiled tropical paradise

- Instead, he quarreled with French colonial authorities, struggled financially, and endured a mental and physical decline

- Contemplating suicide, he explored the fundamental questions about the meaning of life

- Meant to be read from right to left, beginning with the sleeping infant, reaching its climax in the standing youth in the center, and ending with the crouched figure of a woman nearing death

- Created about 887 of them

- Backs to the sea to watch over village

- With the adoption of Christianity in the 1860s, the remaining standing moai were toppled.

- Likely made in Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

- Found in the ceremonial center Orongo

- Characteristics common:

- head is slightly tilted back, as if scanning a distant horizon

- prominent eyebrow ridge

- nose is long and straight, ending in large oval nostrils

- thin lips are set into a downward curve, giving the face a stern, uncompromising expression

- jawline is well defined and massive, and the ears are long

- collarbone is emphasized by a curved indentation, and his chest is defined by carved lines that run downwards from the top of his arms and curve upwards onto the breast to end in the small protruding bumps of his nipples

- arms are held close against the side of the body, the hands rudimentary, carved in low relief

- Asmat people

- The Asmat honored their dead with feasts and rituals, which both commemorated the deceased and reminded the living to avenge their deaths. The towering Asmat "bis" poles were made for these funeral feasts. The basic form of the bis is an openwork pole incorporating several ancestor figures and a winglike projection that represents the pole's phallus.
- In Asmat belief, no death was accidental. Each death was always caused by an enemy, either through headhunting raids or sorcery. Death created an imbalance in society, which the living had to correct by taking an enemy head. When a village had suffered a number of deaths, it would hold a bis ceremony, which consisted of a series of feasts held over several months. A number of bis poles were carved for the ceremony and displayed in front of the men's house, where they formed the center of a mock battle between men and women. The poles were kept until a successful headhunt had been carried out and the balance restored. After a final feast, the Asmat abandoned the bis poles in the sago palm groves from which they obtained their primary food. As the poles decayed, their fertile supernatural power seeped into the earth and fertilized the sago trees.

 - On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 354

- Hard edges of Ingres, looks simplistic, charming, direct

- Also seeking simplicity of pre-civilization

- Not widely recognized during his lifetime; later Picasso and his circle admired his flatness, abstraction, directness, untaught style

- Influenced by curvilinear forms of Gauguin, intense brushwork and color of Van Gogh

- Explored psychology, subconscious

- About deep, inner anxiety; universal anxiety of modern man

- Skull-like head, compressed, writhing

- Landscape is oozing, unstable

- Violent perspective

- (forget what we know about perspective, modeling, etc.)

- A passage in Munch’s diary dated January 22, 1892, and written in Nice, contains the probable inspiration for this scene as the artist remembered it: “I was walking along the road with two friends—the sun went down—I felt a gust of melancholy—suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death—as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city—My friends went on—I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I felt a vast infinite scream [tear] through nature.” 

- We don’t hear the scream, but we feel it resonating inside of us.

- Inspired by Munch “The Kiss” 1897, and Rodin’s sculpture “The Kiss”

- Fascination with patterns and shapes, jewel like (gold like Byzantine mosaics)

- Passion beautiful, dangerous (abyss)

- Decorative; wanted to break down the hierarchy between fine arts and decorative arts (Vienna Secession: avant-garde artists’ organization; anti academic art)

- African American; studied with Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, but went to Paris because little hope of opportunities for black artist in America

- Son of a preacher; religious imagery

- We are in the sky with the angels looking down on holy land; shepherds and fire

- Material world dissolved, ethereal

- From Gates of Hell (inspired by Michelangelo’s Last Judgment)

- Represents: poetry? Philosophy? Variety of interpretations; Huge hands and feet; indecision; so muscular

- Combines traits of reflection and action

- Complexity admired

- Not conceived as single figure but as part of gates of hell

- commissioned to commemorate 6 citizens who agreed to sacrifice themselves during the 1347 siege of Calais in the Hundred Years’ War;

- In exchange for the 6 burghers, the English agreed to lift the siege and spare the town (6 were eventually freed)

- Emotionally charged: confront death with fear, resignation, anguish

- Study question: The city of Calais commissioned this sculpture to memorialize an event from the city’s past. Discuss ways in which the sculptor’s conception, which was not acceptable to city officials, broke with traditional notions of heroic sculpture.

- (also Jugendstil—Germany;
Secession Style—Vienna)
- Mostly architecture and decorative arts
- Characterized by abstract organic forms
- Influenced by William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement
- Different: embraced mass production and new industrial materials; sometimes purely abstract

- Style began in Belgium

- Wrought iron columns, railings in stairwell; linear patterns of sinuous curves; organic fluidity (things growing)

- furniture, jewelry, interiors; related to styles of Beardsley, Munch, Gauguin

- Barcelona; style reflects Catalan nationalism

- Large apartment house: devoted to the ideal of “natural” form; believed there are no straight lines in nature

- Destroyed architectural box; undulating façade, irregularly shaped interior spaces

- Evokes sand castles, seaside cliffs, waves, wrought iron balconies like seaweed (Mediterranean coast)

- Changes in society: first airplane, Einstein’s theory of relativity (time, space, and motion not fixed but all relative in relation to observer’s own position), Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, new discoveries in quick succession, splitting of atom; world now seen as constantly shifting and fractured

- Where is the center of the art world? (Paris)

- In the tradition of Michelangelo, Rodin; he was an assistant to Rodin at beginning of career

- Minimized, abstracted

- More abstract; Egg shape suggests birth and fertility

- Resembles head with mouth open; first cry

- “Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things.” Essential truths without clutter of visual naturalism; essence of perfection

- Elemental power of Cycladic sculpture and African masks (studied by Brancusi, Picasso, Mattisse, etc.)

- 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

- 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

- 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

- 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.

- Elegant play of positive and negative space.

- 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.

- Portrait = Ife Remembered (4:33)

- Not all African art is abstract

- Discovered near a palace in Ife (in Nigeria); believed to have been used in royal burials/funerary ceremonies

- Portrait quality

- Ife believed to be the land of the gods, first holy city, center of creation

- Related to the garden of Eden

- Head=center of power

- Lost wax casting technology

- scarification

- 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

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

- Sculpture has always been: solid mass surrounded by space

- things in nature—people, animals

- Logical extension of Synthetic Cubism: Construction, or assemblage; redefines sculpture as he had painting: assembled instead of carved, molded, etc.

- Most musical instruments

- Painted (irony: cross hatching to show shadow, unnecessary on sculpture)

- Visual equivalent of music: rhythm of shape, color, texture

- Visual game

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

- Nationalistic mood; used by German artists during early Renaissance

- 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

- 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

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

- Optimism of modernity: machines, motion, etc.

- 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.

- 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?

- 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.

- Classical buildings, figurative=allegiance to classical past

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

- Trying to portray feelings through a new language, new vocabulary

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

- Focused on absurdity, element of chance

- (Enlightenment values of logic and reason only lead to war)

- Challenged status quo in art, culture, etc.

- Dada: French word for “hobbyhorse.”: Two German poets stabbed knife into dictionary and point landed on that word; association with childishness, chance, absurdity

- Logic and reason (Enlightenment) only leads to war

- 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)

- “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

- 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.”

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

- 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)

- 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?)

- Oil on canvas

- "The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!"^[2]

- 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

- Time? Rational, measured

- Death, deterioration

- Everything is irrational—attack on the rational

- Viewers’ own unconscious

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

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

- Gift for composer Erik Satie

- Tacks glued onto flat side of an iron

- Suggests pain, violence, uselessness?

- Juxtaposition two desirable things; becomes disturbing

- 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

- 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]

- 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

- Overall record 450 million (Salvator Mundi)

- Sold by O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM (WHY?)

- 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.”

- 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)

- 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

- 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

- Captures destitution, emotional distress of migrant workers

- Immediate impact: government sent food to CA and opened relief camps for migrant workers; power of images

- 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

- Like synthetic Cubism

- 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 3^rd 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)

- Pablo Picasso, “Guernica”.  Oil on canvas. 1937.

- "No, painting is not made to decorate rooms. An instrument of offensive and defensive war against the enemy; art does not die but is an eternal value, which survives after the chaos." Pablo Picasso

- 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

- Made NYC center of art world for the first time

- As the term suggests, their work was characterized by non-objective imagery that appeared emotionally charged with personal meaning.  The artists, however, rejected these implications of the name. 

- They insisted their subjects were not “abstract,” but rather primal images, deeply rooted in society’s collective unconscious.  Their paintings did not express mere emotion.  They communicated universal truths about the human condition. 

- “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting, similar to the Indian sand painters of the West.”

- 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

- Said he had religious experiences while painting:

- “I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else . . . I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.  And if you . . . Are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!”

- 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)

- 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

- 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

- New generation of artists rejected Abstract Expressionism

- Rauschenberg: “It 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

- Chose everyday, familiar forms

- Takes readymades 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

- 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

- 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

- 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.

- Pop art—term coined in Britain in 1950’s; pop culture

- Abstract Expressionism had become “high art;” new artists wanted something less elitist

- Sought a mass-produced look; everybody can understand, available to all (but not! Irony)

- Similar to Dada in love of ready-made common objects

- 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)

Was making art based on comic books at exactly the same time as Lichtenstein; turned to commercial design

Began as illustrator of women’s shoes; fascinated by manipulative role of advertising and product packaging; also by impact of mass media on public opinion

“I want to be a machine.” opposite Pollock (wanted to be one with nature)

- Soup=letter

- 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

- Eliminated any sense of space

- Art for art’s sake

- Hard-Edge Abstraction

- 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?

- Acrylic

- Influenced by contours of typeface

- 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

- 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

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

- 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.)

- 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

- Also dedicated to African-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

- 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)

- Prevalence of tv in America, rapidly changing

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