Tradition vs. innovation

Massive

Classical

Simplified into idealized, geometric forms; gives a quality of psychological withdrawal and reserve

Titles allegorical

German=Come unto Christ

Expressionism=Klee music video (3:23)

Influences:

• symbolism

• African art

• medieval art

• Nietzsche's philosophy

• post-impressionism

  • European (such as French artist Paul Gauguin, Dutch Vincent van Gogh, Norwegian Edvard Much)

• primitivism

• 
  

Expressionism: Art with particular emphasis on emotional content

Like Fauves: vibrant palette (not based on naturalism); distortion or flattening of space

In German Expressionism, nationalism manifested itself through a focus on expressing the anxieties and collective identity of the German people during a turbulent period,

Different: engaged in contemporary social issues

Themes: longing for past, ties to homeland, interest in simpler, more authentic life

Interest in ethnographic art seen in museums: Oceanic and African art: saw a vitality, authenticity lacking in western art

Crisis of faith—distrust of organized religion; Die Brucke influenced by Nietsche (God is dead, nihilism); shows distrust, scrutiny of modern world, city life

Der Blaue Reiter sought spirituality in countryside, nature, other sources—retreated from city life

Lots of nudes—more scrutinizing, less idealizing; also interest in freedom, nature—distrust of  old rules, morals

Bring images of influences and groups find applications to certain artists?

• Monet

• Degas

• Toulouse-Lautrec

• Whistler

• Searat

• Gauguin

• Cezanne

• Van Gogh

• German medieval art

• Munch/woodcuts of Munch

• African art

• Oceanic Art

• Russian folk art

• Matisse/fauvism

• Durer

• Stained glass

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was part of the group called

• Die Brücke

Influences: Van Gogh, Matisse, Munch, De Gaugh

• De Gaugh- unflattering moments in time

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

Abstract art vs.

• Non-objective art

• Non-narrative art

• Non-representational art

Movement in Munich; name came from a painting by Kandinsky

Turned away from modern, industrialized society; turned to folk culture, nature, medieval past

Search for spirituality (Kandinsky published book called Concerning the Spiritual in Art)

Law student in Russia, gave up professorship to study art

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

• influenced by: Georges Seurat

  • pointillism

• folk art influence

Space?

• very flat

• simplified shapes

Color?

• mostly uses primary colors

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

Cubism: rather than rejection of the significance of the natural world like Kandinsky, Cubism reexamines

Reasons for abstraction:

• Kandinsky felt western tradition was too tied to the visible world; he wanted his art to prompt viewers to contemplate a higher, spiritual realm, not remind them of their earthly concerns

Objects are analyzed, broken down, and dissected

Time of intense collaboration; hard to tell apart; for a time they even stopped signing their own canvases

Objects were broken down into flat shapes that represented different viewpoints. 

The color palette was limited to muted tones like grays, browns, and blues. 

Art critic and dealer; wrote about theory of Cubism; sat for portrait about 20 times

Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler "What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense?”

Colors more reduced

Figure/ground more ambiguous

More fragmented

portrays: Portuguese man playing a guitar

Few recognizable objects: what do you recognize?

Facets have shading but completely flat; grid like; solid form dissolves

Yet he captures a likeness: wave of hair, drooping eye, clasped hands

Shimmering light: daubed paintbrush in white with colors

Rather than breaking images down and reconstructing as lines and planes, images are constructed from diverse components

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)

• based on a French breakfast table

• Wiker chair- only thing that puts depth into the painting (rest is flat)

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”

Cubist art with overt political goals

1909 an Italian poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in newspapers in Italy and France.

Felt that reverence for history and past artistic traditions needed to be abandoned in order to move society and art decisively into the modern age.

Nationalistic: advocated expansion of Italian industry and territory

Modernity=movement

Wanted to convey motion, dynamic imagery, and social progress

Futurist cooking will be free of the old obsessions with volume and weight and will have as one of its principles the abolition of pastasciutta. Pastasciutta, however agreeable to the palate, is a passéist food because it makes people heavy, brutish, deludes them into thinking it is nutritious, makes them skeptical, slow, pessimistic.

[Pasta] is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental skepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.

Any pastascuittist who honestly examines his conscience at the moment he ingurgitates his biquotidian pyramid of pasta will find within the gloomy satisfaction of stopping up a black hole. This voracious hole is an incurable sadness of his. He may delude himself, but nothing can fill it. Only a Futurist meal can lift his spirits.

reason why streetlight is so bright- innovations they made, symbolizing that the new world and what its becoming is better than it has been in the past

hold futurist meetings 'serate futurist' recite poems and display art

emphasis on violence

wanted to eliminate old traditions and focus on new technology

• promoted destruction of museums, libraries, and feminism

Over five feet tall, with a diminutive moon in the corner. Why would he have made such a choice?

Light post--object that is forthrightly modern and technological: one of the new, electric street lamps that were just being installed at this time in Rome, where Balla lived.

Just as the street light stands for the future in the picture, the small moon stands for the past. In part Balla means this in a literal sense. In the past people relied on the moon to see at night; in modern times we rely on electricity. But Balla is also alluding to a number of Marinetti’s writings in which the moon was used as a symbol for the artistic traditionalism that the Futurists wanted to destroy. Summed up in his slogan “Let’s kill the moonlight!” Marinetti attacked the gentle light of the moon and its long association with traditional romance and sentimentality. He condemned past generations of artists and poets as “lovers of the moon,” and called for a more modern and aggressive symbol—like a racing car or a train—to take its place.

Knew about Cubist style form other Russian painters—never went to Paris (although modeled forms like Leger)

Uses Cubist forms to portray a village scene

Social agenda? Peasants—just 5 years before Russian revolution

Called his style Cubo-Futurism

borrows from cubism: geometric shapes used, Fragmented things

differences than cubism: the use of cylindrical shapes here and there and the gradation of different hues in each shape and it wasn’t all flat and brighter colors. Pulls from Russian Folklore, narrative stytle

He created Suprematism.  he defined it as “the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art”. Was of ideal, new realism, universal language, emphasis on feeling, philosophy – pure feeling over true realistic rendering of objects

Movement of Russian artists after 1917 Revolution who enlisted art in the service of the new Soviet system

Wanted to create full integration of art and life

Founded by Vladimir Tatlin: saw Picasso’s Cubist sculptures (assemblages built up with wood, metal, paper, plastic, etc. rather than subtractive or built up with mass of clay)

Sculpture the last to join modernism; always traditional materials, subjects

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

The Birth of Dada in Zürich

Reaction against World War I
Focused on absurdity, element of chance
(belief that 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

an art and literary movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland during World War I. Dada art is often satirical and nonsensical, and the movement rejected traditional values. 

Influences:

• Dada influenced artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York, and Cologne. \

• Dada is considered the first conceptual art movement and a watershed moment in the development of modern art. 

• The ideas of Dada became the cornerstones of various categories of modern and contemporary art. 

Medium: Torn-and-pasted paper and colored paper on colored paper

\poets would read nonsensical poetry in this famous cafe Volter

• work that focused on chance and obscurity

Arp born in Strasbourg: part of Germany and then France; studied art in Paris, moved to Zurich in 1915 to avoid being drafted by the German Army during WWI

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)

Neo-Plasticism

International Style

Medium; oil on canvas

Description:

• The painting is an example of the Neoplasticism movement, which is non-representational. 

• It uses primary colors, right angles, and straight lines. 

• The painting is an exercise in asymmetry, with each square being a different color and size. 

• The painting's gridded lines distribute blocks of primary colors across the canvas. 

• The painting is considered a mature stage of Mondrian's abstraction. 

Surrealism
1. Exploration of the subconscious mind
2. Dream images and randomness related to         dream states
3. Stream of consciousness
4. Irrationality
5. Chance
6. Juxtaposition of unrelated objects
7. Media experimentation

In common with Dada: element of chance, randomness (not politically charged); also nonsenseExtension of Dada movement; wanted to explore subconscious thought and and bypass restrictions placed on people by social convention

Began as literary movement; automatic poetry; 1924, Surrealism was announced to the public through the publication of André Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism” 

Automatic drawing—draw in a trance-like state

Exquisite Corpse (game of folded paper);  juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects suggests a cryptic meaning and otherworldliness

Activities: Exquisite Corpse (game of folded paper);  juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects suggests a cryptic meaning and otherworldliness

Jean Arp Composition: p. 323

Free association: what does this work remind you of? First thing that comes to mind

Extension of Dada movement; wanted to explore subconscious thought and and bypass restrictions placed on people by social convention

Began as literary movement; automatic poetry; 1924, Surrealism was announced to the public through the publication of André Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism” 

Automatic drawing—draw in a trance-like state

oil on canvas

“The Persistence of Memory of 1931 is a denial of every twentieth-century experiment in abstract organization” (p. 332). What does that mean?

Also tiny

Infinite space like Tanguy; rendered with hard objectivity

Presentation of recognizable objects in an unusual context, with unnatural attributes, on an unexpected scale

Obsessed with morphology of hard and soft

“nothing more than the soft, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical Camembert cheese of space and time”

Stream of consciousness process: one thing led to another

Time? Rational, measured

Death, deterioration

Everything is irrational—attack on the rational

Viewers’ own unconscious

Medium: Oil on beaverboard

Emily Pendleton, Channing Winget and Jade Hammond—principles of design

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

Window into Midwest world where Wood grew up and lived

What can you tell about these people?

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

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

Neat and clean: crisp drawing, verticals and horizontals

Industrious: pitchfork, plants on porch

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

Diverse group of artists:

Opposed to any art that smacked of nationalism

Influenced by Surrealism: automatism, myth

Belief that abstract art could express universal, timeless themes;

Abstract art could convey a sense of the whole range of human emotional experiences

2 camps: Action or gesture painting and color-field painting

Abstract Expressionism was the first style from the US to make the international scene, moving the art center of the world from Paris to NYC. Could Abstract Expressionism have happened anywhere, or was it a particularly American style? Explain.'

Gestural painting

• Term coined by Harold Rosenberg in 1952: “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event”

Figures stand ceremonially at either end of a large rectangle: table, altar, or funeral bier

Watchdog (wolf?) beneath

Covered canvas with calligraphic, cryptic marks like hieroglyphics

Influenced by ritual Navajo sand painting, African sculpture, prehistoric art, Egyptian painting

Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious as a repository for ancient myths and universal archetypes

In letter to New York Times, Rothko, Newman, and Gottlieb proclaimed their “spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

First made compositions based on classical myths

By mid-1940’s painted biomorphic, Surrealist-inspired hybrid creatures floating  with loose, undefined edges within larger expanses of color

Pop artists reveled in breaking the rules: look for how

• never mundane

Reaction to elitism of Abstract Expressionism

• Pop art emerged as a direct reaction against the perceived seriousness and elitism of Abstract Expressionism, embracing popular culture, mass media, and consumerism as legitimate subjects for art, and blurring the lines between "high" and "low" culture. 

• a protest against the perceived elitism of abstract expressionism, which, with its detachment from reality, was seen as inaccessible to the average person.

Sought a mass-produced look

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

Interested in materialism of consumer culture

Pop art—term coined in Britain in 1957; pop culture

Richard Hamilton: “Popular, (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous and Big Business.”

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; but also critique on empty materialism of consumer culture

Medium: Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports

Robert Rauschenberg on Abstract Expressionism: (he uses a lot of mixed media)

• “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.”

“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 picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.” Robert Rauschenberg

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952:

1.Influenced by painterly abstraction; flat, interested in emphasis of the picture plane

2.Less emphasis on evidence of the artist’s gesture/paint texture

3.More sharply defined compositions

4.Open design—elements go beyond bounds of the artwork

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

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

Helen Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea is an example of which style?

• Post-Painterly Abstraction

What is the medium for Mountains and Sea?

• oil

Minimalism=The Case for Minimalism (4:36)

Reaction to Abstract Expressionism; sought to make unemotional art

Eliminated any sense of space

Art for art’s sake

Latest state of his Suprematist works: monochromatic paintings

Complete renunciation of the physical world

White=”real concept of infinity”

Addresses the impossibility of separating language from thought

3 representations of “chairness” evoke Plato’s Theory of Forms, which holds that the true form of something exists only in the idea of that thing; all representations of the idea are degraded versions

what is art, what is meaning

Also semiotics=the study of signs

Kosuth didn’t make the chair, take the photograph, or write the definition; he selected and assembled them together. But is this art? And which representation of the chair is most “accurate”? These open-ended questions are exactly what Kosuth wanted us to think about when he said that “art is making meaning.” By assembling these three alternative representations, Kosuth turns a simple wooden chair into an object of debate and even consternation, a platform for exploring new meanings.

• Art as Idea as Idea: Kosuth has said that “art is making meaning,” and in his work he investigates the ways in which art-making is tied to language. This work is part of a series based on definitions clipped from dictionary entries for words including “art,” “chair,” “meaning,” or, in this reflexive example, “definition.” Kosuth considers the work of art to be the definition of the given word, but for the purpose of presentation he asks that his original cut-out dictionary entry be photographically enlarged to a specific dimension each time the work is exhibited.

• 
  

Performance art/conceptual art

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

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

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979

Began feminist art movement

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

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

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

Extensive research

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

• like the 12 apostles

919 other women’s names inscribed in tiles

• 999 names inscribed in total

• includes people like: Primordial Goddess, Ishtar, Hatshepsut, Theodora, Artemesia Gentileschi, Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, and Georgia O’Keeffe

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)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Running Fence, 1972-76

Running=documentary (5:00)

Fence=Smithsonian Documentary (4:31)

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

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

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

  working with farmers to get their permission to use their land

  getting local people to help with the construction

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

Antonio Lopez Garcia, Washbasin and Mirror, 1967

Oil on wood

Spaniard

Meticulous attention to mundane objects; but makes it interesting

Attention to geometry, grid, composition

Medium: fabric, glitter, synthetic polymer paint on canvas

Miriam Shapiro, Black Bolero, 1980

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

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

Robert Venturi, architect: “Less is a bore.”

Many parts have no function (chimney is false, stairs going nowhere)

Like a child’s drawing of a house

Issues: reaction against lack of emotion in Minimalism

Germany: how to come to terms with WWII

• Reaction against consumerism of west

• Reaction to art market

• Negotiating influence of photography

• Mass media

A return to emotion after the detachment of Minimalism

A return to seeking influence from the past

A return to expressing contemporary issues

For many Germans, a time of confronting and coming to terms with the Nazi past
(Kiefer, Richter)

For many, a reaction to corporate, capitalist culture (Polke, Longo)

Pluralism of styles vs. a logical order (Richter)

Medium: oil, emulsion, shellac, acrylic paint, woodcut, and straw on linen

Over 30 versions painted

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

Medium: Wood boat, canvas sail, arrows, metal, rope, Chinese flag, and electric fan

rooted in Chinese philosophy and expressed in the Western vocabulary of the readymade

Built on the skeleton of an old fishing boat excavated near Cai's birthplace, the sculpture, suspended aboveground, is pierced with 3,000 made-in-China arrows and flies the national flag

The title—which alludes to a text from the third century (known as Sanguozhi)—refers to an episode in which the general Zhuge Liang, facing an imminent attack from the enemy, manages to replenish a depleted store of arrows

El Anatsui. Dzesi II. 2006

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?

El Anatsui, Hovor II (detail), 2004 showing tiny bits of scrap tin, woven pieced together with wire

Liguor lables remind us of trade in enslaved people and also highlight the scale of waste produced by modern consumerism

Brighter-colored pigments were made available by advances in industrial manufacturing

• color gives us value

• draws the eye in

• setting the mood

Fauves used colors in their strongest states as an act of defiance against the Academy’s rigid rules

Assertion 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

Age of photography; artists didn’t want to imitate

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

What are the jobs of color in this painting? In the Matisse portraits?

• Defines objects

• Shows outlines of objects

• Describes how objects look

• Gives a cool, quiet feeling

• Shows light, reflections

• color

  • color determines the mood of the painting

  • color adds contrast

  • balances out composition

  • gives shape to everything

  • tells what stuff is

Met Museum (Smarthistory: 4:49)

What region of Baroque art? Dutch

What does it have in common with other Dutch art? Attention to household objects

Woman is so quiet and still; we see her reverence and attention and it makes us want to pay attention (moment in time)

Margareta (Greta) Moll (1884-1977) was a sculptor and a painter. She and her husband Oskar were students at Matisse’s academy and early collectors of his work.

This painting's spontaneous technique and the simplicity of its design are misleading: Greta Moll recalled that she had to sit during ten three-hour sessions. 

After seeing a painting by Veronese in the Louvre in Paris, Matisse reworked the portrait extensively, broadening the arms and emphasizing the curve of the eyebrows, to give the figure grandeur and monumentality. The flowered cotton print against which the sitter is placed reappears in a number of his works at this time.

Paolo Veronese, The Feast in the House of Levi: oil on canvas (6:10)

Veronese=Sister Wendy (start at 24:28)

Subject?

Aimed for naturalism of Titian’s earlier work, added everyday reality (animals, food, clothing details) and monumental architectural frameworks and pageantry, huge scale (18’x42’)

Spirituality, psychology gives way to observation

Subject of Inquisition for including “buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs, and similar vulgarities” unsuitable for a sacred scene; Veronese said, “I received the commission to decorate the picture as I saw fit. It is large, and it seemed to me, it could hold many figures.”

What is the most important subject of this painting?

• The harmony of line, color, and shape

• the pervasive use of red color

name 5 works of art that might have influenced this painting

• Paul Cezanne

  • fruit and still life's

• Seurat

• Whistler

  • harmony of color

• Paul Gauguin

  • non naturalistic and use of red

• Edouard Vuillard

  • patterns

What most reinforced the flatness of the picture plane?

• The prevalence of the color red

• The repeated arabesques and patterns

• The strong outlines and lack of modeling

• The absence of a horizon line and linear perspective

What is the subject of this painting?

• Another window

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

Just as poetry uses words for sounds and rhythms as much as meaning, Matisse uses color and shapes for visual harmony as much as meaning.

Life size and really close up

MET

Life size and in extreme closeup

Boldly outlined in black

Derain kept this portrait until his death in 1954

Subject is color: black and gold; just as subject of Harmony in Red is Red

James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, c. 1875

Exhibited at London’s Grosvenor Gallery in 1877

As he emphasized color and form, he became increasingly abstract: Nocturnes (music term for night scenes) of the Thames Rives (fireworks)

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.

Writing topic: Is there a relationship between how long a piece of art took to execute and the value of the piece of art? Explain.

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.”

Writing topic: Why do you think many consider Cezanne the “father of modern art?”

Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Apples in a Bowl, 1879-83:

• Look at balance (shape, color, etc.)

• 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

Paul Gauguin, The Vision after the Sermon, 1888: (Smarthistory: 3:38*)

Felt western civilization lacked spirituality—too materialistic

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

MOMA

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

Figure-ground reversal

How is space shown and not shown?

• overuse of the color red

• no shadow shapes

Detail (MoMA); reserve lines

Influenced by van Gogh; choppy, short, bold brushstrokes

What is new?

What is traditional?

Aquatint, etching, drypoint

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, 6^th edition, 2010, 122)

“What I love about this piece is its humanity. I look at this piece and see an emotion everyone has experienced at one point. Pure sorrow. Hopelessness. Misery. It depicts Christ in His humblest hour, and I feel like in that moment, he was truly, purely human. This moment has been depicted in many ways, … but in this abstract and soulful style, I understand.”

Natalie Burgess, Spring 2024.

New kind of religious image; meant for contemplation

Painted wood

Pieta=sorrow (pity as well as piety) : gut-wrenching; German expressionism

Emphasizes personal relationship with God; wants us to share horror of Christ’s suffering and identify with grief of Mary

Encourages Compassion (“to suffer with”)

Roots in past (compare with Ottonian Geru crucifix; weightier, more physical than Carolingian)

Matthias Grunewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (closed): In Germany before Protestant Reformation took hold (1520’s)

For monastery church and hospital: theme of disease and healing

Main illness at hospital: St. Anthony’s Fire (caused by a fungus that grew on rye; caused convulsions and gangrene, often compelled amputation

2 moveable halves of the predella, if slid apart, made it appear that the legs of the body of Christ had been amputated (also one of Christ’s arms); also blackening of feet

View during the week: St. Sebastion (left) protects against plague

                St. Anthony Abbot (right) identified with miraculous cure; healer

                crucifixion in the center (heroic scale)

  Mary and John on left, Mary Magdelene below, John the Baptist on right (he must increase and I must decrease)

               expressive more than naturalistic: scale of Christ, supernatural light, gnarled fingers, muscles and lacerations;

Mood? “Dreadful ugliness of pain”

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

Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse, 1906 (Romanian, went to Paris—center of art world)

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

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, 1879-87

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

Constantin Brancusi, The Newborn, 1915:

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

Concentrated on themes of creation, birth, life, and death

What does Brancusi say about love?

• Symbolizes the strength, permanence, and depth of love by associating the image with the timelessness of the original limestone

Only large-scale outdoor work

Recalls ancient obelisks, Romanian folk art

Modular, abstract—influences Minimalism of 1960’s

Kirchner's works can be characterized by each of the following EXCEPT

• Calm, inviting social scenes

but this piece is

• Anti-naturalistic color

  B. Spilling perspective

  C. Expressive brushwork

What is the medium of this work by Wasily Kandinsky?

• woodcut print

Influence of woodcuts on Kandinsky’s abstraction

The title of this work by Wasily Kandinsky refers to

• Music

colors

• saturated and mostly primary colors

Kandinsky had a condition called: Synethia- can see color in sound

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

• improvisation

This work by Kandinsky is one of the first paintings to

• be completely non-representational

Jawlensky painted this on

• cardboard

Ottonian

Large-scale, free-standing sculpture rare in early middle ages: Why? fear of idol worship; preferred portable objects

Monumental work here; life-size; wood

Emphasizes expressive quality, emotion; physicality: hangs; dead weight; suffering (we feel suffering)

Ottonian

Tradition of expressionism in Germany

Bishop Bernward commissioned sculptured bronze doors for St. Michael’s; known to excel in the arts

16’ tall

Bishop Bernward had been to Rome; may have gotten ideas there; each door cast as one piece of bronze (lost wax process---first monumental since antiquity)

First doors since Early Christian period to show stories

high relief; casts shadows

Expressive, gestural (becomes typical of German art up into 20^th-century (German Expressionism)

Finger of the Lord against void: focal point

Doors=Smarthistory: Bronze Doors, St. Michael’s, Hildesheim, commissioned by Bishop Bernward, 1015 (4:23)

Pieta, German, Rhineland, ca. 1375-1400 (Cloisters, MET)

Popular subject in later Middle Ages

Small scale of Christ may reflect the writings of German mystics, who believed that the Virgin, in the agony of her grief, imagined that she was holding Jesus as a baby in her arms once again.

Studied art in Germany, visited Paris often; saw works of Post-Impressionists

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

wanted it to look honest

• not trying to hide the fact that its painting

• leave things up to interpretation

• trying to reach authenticity

  • looked at children's art for influence

Academic painting: tight brushstroke, sentimentality; costumed

Modersohn Becker found this style unauthentic and overly sentimental

a lot of Idealization being represented

Self-portraits; Wanted to be direct, authentic; unsentimental

Jointly owned by MoMA and Neue Galerie, NYC

heavy influenced by van Gogh

• thick paint

• expressive paint brush strokes

MOMA (2:20)

Critique of modern society 

influenced by: Toulouse-Lautrec

• out of focus background people

• jagged cut look to it like his prints

• rhythms

Rawness influenced by African, Oceanic art

influence: African masks

grossly distorted

not trying to idealize

• crude

Landscape paintings are jagged, compressed

influenced by: Monet

• city scape

• cooler colors

• exaggeration

• brush strokes, random but make it cohesive

influenced by; Suzanne

• loose brush strokes

• ambiguous space

How does he portray himself? What is medium? (oil on canvas) What is he trying to do with medium?

• going out of his way to make it not look like oil

  • make it more like crayon look

  • heavy outlines feel child like

    • leaving white spots

This brooding face confronts the viewer with an immediacy and deep emotion that leave no doubt about the prophet's spirituality. His hollow eyes, furrowed brow, sunken cheeks, and solemn countenance express his innermost feelings. Three years before Nolde executed this print, he had experienced a religious transformation while recovering from an illness. Following this episode, he began depicting religious subjects in paintings and prints, such as the image seen here.

influenced by: munx

• wood grain like the kiss

green faces, sickly feel, expressive, emotional

• wasn't trying to be disrespectful

• Jesus' face is the brightest and focal

  • can see the light reflecting on the disciples

Emil Nolde

Strong identification with homeland

Joined Die Brucke for one year (1906)

Expressionist religious paintings and prints

Figures crammed in space; heightened emotion, not remote (compare with Leonardo da Vinci)

Vasily Kandinsky, Sketch I for “Composition VII.” 1913: Smarthistory 11:00 (watch 2:28-6:00)

have something not of this world, more spiritual

• poetic formal qualities

• no iconography

Often focused on cataclysmic events and renewal such as biblical flood and apocalypse in Revelation; believed that the earth needed spiritual renewal

“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

Felt western tradition was too tied to the visible world; he wanted his art to prompt viewers to contemplate a higher, spiritual realm, not remind them of their earthly concerns

Who was the first artist to make non-representational art?

• Georgiana Houghton

Spiritualist: believed she could communicate with the dead, including her sister; eventually said she communicated with Corregio and Titian

Trained in art; believed that she could show her spiritual experiences and visions through series of overlapping lines and colors

Later, Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint were also interested in spiritualism

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the first abstract works known in Western art history.^[1] A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian.^[2] She belonged to a group called "The Five", comprising a circle of women inspired by Theosophy, who shared a belief in the importance of trying to contact the so-called "High Masters"—often by way of séances.^[3] Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas and experiences

Klint felt that certain colors symbolized  ideas; yellow was “the splendid color of light, of the foundation of knowledge.”

Light and knowledge that one achieves in adulthood

She asked that these paintings not be shown publicly until twenty years after her death

Looked to nature and folk art for inspiration

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,

reverse image painting look

• likes how simplified it looked

Russian

Painted on cardboard

simplistic

red- violence

yellow- femininity

blue- masculinity and spirituality

Turned to animals as a source of spiritual harmony and purity; renewers of spirituality to western culture

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.

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

Combined curvilinear patterns with a new rectangular geometry; horses recomposed as fractured shapes, parallel to picture plane\

influenced by cubism and stain glass

Influenced by Kandinsky, Cubism, Fauvism, colors of Franz Marc

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

Macke killed in early weeks of war, age 27

Trip to Tunisia (northern Africa) intense colors; opened his eyes to color and possibility of expression through color

Chose watercolor to capture feeling of color and light

Interest in geometry, musical harmony, personal invention

Also did some completely non-objective (but most had reference to nature)

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

Paul Klee, The Niesen, 1915:

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

“The Niesen” was moving to me in the quiet simplicity and calming emotion it seemed to give me. It was very innocent and child-like.” Renae Hunter

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.”

Extreme elongation, plays with voids and solids

Mood?

• agony

Sculptures carved in wood or cast in bronze

• dynamic, angular, thick, in motion

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)

Who is the artist?

• Pablo Picasso

The artist used all of the following features EXCEPT  

• B. a clear relationship between figure and ground

it is

• planes that dissolve into each other

• incorporation of text

• a subdued palette

This work reflects the artist’s interest in

• multiple viewpoints

The style of the painting is

• Analytical Cubism

Which of the following artists also worked in this style?

• Georges Braque

NOT CUBISM

Reasons for abstraction:

Matisse wanted to focus on beauty of the formal aspects of art;

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

Cubism: Reasons for abstraction:

Rather than rejection of the significance of the natural world like Kandinsky, Cubism reexamines how we look at and document the natural world;

1905 Einstein published theory of relativity: neither space nor time is a fixed, stable measure--both change in relation to the speed and position of an observer.

Philosopher Henri Bergson: no one can ever experience a single instant of time: the past, present, and future are not separate moments but an unbreakable continuum.

Examining perception—not fixed

Blue Period (1901-1904): focused on suffering, poverty, good friend from Spain took his own life

• used a lot of blue in paintings

Experienced poverty as a young artist, also the suicide of his fellow-Spaniard artist friend

Thin, attenuated figures like El Greco (16^th-century Mannerist)

Rose period (1905-1906): settled in Paris; circle of artists, poets, actors, critics

Preoccupied with the subject of acrobatic performers who traveled from town to town (saltimbanques)

Largest painting to date—71/2 feet tall

Emotionally distant; barren landscape, nobody looks at one another

Self portrait as Harlequin: homeless entertainers eking out a living through creative talents symbols of Picasso’s own life as an artist

• feels something in comon with them

  • moving from place to place

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

• he captured her personality and her strong nature more than her actual looks

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

• wasn't received well

• had her sit down 90 times- didn't like her face so he changed it, did it out of memory instead

  • Gertrude- she liked it and thought it was one the best paintings she had seen

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

Adjectives?

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

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

• in the sketch there were 2 men sailor and medical student, see how people view woman

  • how do we view these women

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

• didn't care about African history just liked the mask concept, wanted it to be bold

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,6^th edition, 166)

How did this lead to Cubism?

Braque started as Fauvist but, like Picasso, became fascinated with ideas of Cezanne

• they were like 2 peas in a pod, they were at each other's studios, copying each other

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

• arbitrary color, reduced to geometric forms (flattened it)

  • flattened was taken from fauvism

• disillusioned of form

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)

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bibemus Quarry, c. 1897-1900:

Compare with first Mont Sainte-Victoire

Becomes increasingly abstract

More compressed; less depth

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

Freed painting from representational role

Had a powerful influence on Picasso and Matisse

Writing topic: Why do you think many consider Cezanne the “father of modern art?”

Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Apples in a Bowl, 1879-83:

Look at balance (shape, color, etc.)

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

done in Southern Spain

analytic cubism

• multiple forms

angular shapes

• see different things from different angles

complicated but simple at the same time

power of relations: new thing

• challenging morbidity and is the limpidity of what cubism can be

influenced by Suzan

Picasso is doing somethings that Cimabue did 600 years before: space is ambiguous, different viewpoints (multiple, contradictory perspectives)

12 feet tall

Cimabue=bull’s head; stubborn; from Florence

Byzantine: gold, long nose, frontal, solemn expression

Loved Byzantine color, but 3-D throne—shows space

Which trend?

Braque said is shows  an emigrant on the bridge of a boat with a harbor in the background

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

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? The 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 sound hole 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

The Cubists deconstructed sculpture just as they had deconstructed painting

Sculpture has always been: solid mass surrounded by space

  carved—subtractive

  things in nature—people, animals

paper plays multiple roles in physical and descriptive

inspired by folk collage 18 and 19th century

he used all sorts of tools to manipulate his paint

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

This piece of work was made from sheet metal which he crimped and folded to look like a guitar seeing all angles at once. He used geometric shapes that create the guitar which makes the sculpture look more abstract in its interpretation of a guitar. I noticed that things that are on a guitar that would usually pop out are popping in and vice versa. Most artists during  this time would be focusing on making art of the earth, things that were not man made.  When he did a representational sculpture of a guitar that was a bit abstract, he was challenging what people see as art. Picasso was trying to get the essence of a guitar without fully making it. He was influenced by 19^th century and how photography was releasing artists from having depict and started to focus on the language of depicting instead.

Pablo Picasso, Violin, 1915:

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

Simultaneous: suggests motion

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

Non-objective?

the date that is written on it is wrong, it was made in 1913

• would date their paintings further to say they painted the idea first

branched off from cubism into its own thing

• space and depth in a different way with color

  • orphism

Aleksandr Archipenko, Walking Woman, 1918-19

Ukrainian, career in France

What ideas has he taken from Picasso’s Cubist constructions?

Sculptural form is not necessarily mass in space; space is enclosed and shaped by concave and convex solids

Mass/space reversal applied to human figure

Guitar shape!

Ukranian, born in 1885; moved to Paris 1905, married Robert Delaunay in 1910

Blanket pieced together from scraps of material after the birth of her son; based on examples made by Russian peasant women

Foreshadowed abstract paintings

Difference between art and craft?—quilts have always been abstract

One of 6 siblings; 4 became artists

Died in WWI in 1918 at age 42

• shaped by his experience in war, started it before being deployed and finished it after

Adjectives?

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

• made of bronze

• transition from an old way of living to a new way of living

  • horse to machinery

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.

wanted to push boundaries

Americans thought it was scandalous and liked it

story telling of his experience, backstory

Nastasha of hometown

Chagall born to a large and poor Jewish family in Russia

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, peasant- agricultural and connection to land, green face man is a portrait of Chagall

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.”

2 faced man: 2 sided nature of man and

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

Cerberus (cat is doorway between reality and mystical) gradian between death

Marc Chagall, Paris Through the Window, 1913

Window: view onto what?

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.”

was so in love he was weightless feeling, floating

his wife showed up to his art studio with flowers on his birthday and he was so happy

Returned to Russia and married Bella 1915

Commemorates Bella’s surprise visit to his studio on his birthday

Floats ecstatically

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.”

After Russian Revolution worked for State Yiddish Chamber Theater in Moscow—painted murals and designed sets and costumes

Fiddler on the Roof is based on Tevye and his Daughters (or Tevye the Dairyman), a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem that he wrote in Yiddish between 1894 and 1914 about Jewish life in a village; influenced by this painting

Painted after return to Paris but based on one of the paintings he made for the Yiddish Theater

Traditional folk musician in Russian-Jewish villages

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

girl on way home, shops closed for the day, ominous feel

• color pallet, values, dark shadows, calm feel of it, perspective

he kept his roots of Italian, but also used cubism here and there, using more than one point of view

Born in Greece to Italian parents; learned drawing in Athens, family moved to Germany; went to Paris and knew Apollinaire and works of Cubists

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?

almost the nature of the mind, metaphysical topics on thoughts

• metaphysical - the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality

  • loneliness, Nastasha, fear of unknown, premonitions of future, reality beyond physical realm

    • composition makes it more lonely

      • Nastasha

Haunting, dream-like fusion of reality and unreality was termed Metaphysical—led to Metaphysical School

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?

1914, WWI starts

• 1917, still going on

influences in photography influenced by you can illustrate time and speed

cubism influenced:

• abstraction, dynamic lines, multiple perspectives in some ways, lack of color

manifest futurist aims by showing movement and speed (into the future)

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

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

Optimism of modernity: machines, motion, etc.

Pioneering work in photographic studies of motion

used to solve a bet

• if horses have all their feet on the ground when they gallop

in this time there were wars, so this affected the art

• painter wanted people to stop thinking about the past and move on

  • didn't do as much spatial lanes

  • chaos and movement

Violent action, speed, disintegration of solid objects by light

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

brushstrokes moving around, force and movement

not about a soccer player, it's about the chaos in that time period and the game

photography was a big thing

• painters wanted to capture things that photography couldn't like

  • harsh lines, movement

before he made this piece, he was with a group of artists that make a rule

• not allowed to put any nude people

  • he destroyed rule

• until this point, he felt that any sculpture had to have straight lines

• he totally decided to break his own rule

Historical Comparision: Modern "nike" statue (goddess of victory) similarity

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

Title suggests abstract subject; embodies speed, progress, machine

obverse of the Italian-issue 20 cent euro coin.

Has similarities with Nike of Samothrace: stances—body in mid stride, draperies flowing out behind, arms missing (even though classicism despised by Futurists)

Another victory monument; naval victories

Nike is landing on a prow of a ship (or preparing to take flight)

Lift of wings makes body appear weightless

Neither leg supports full weight (variation on contrapposto)

Wings and drapery give body energy

Discovered in original location (rare): stood high on a terrace overlooking the theater and the sea

Suprematism: refers to the “supremacy” of feeling in art: visual phenomena in the objective world are meaningless

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

Trying to portray feelings through a new language, new vocabulary; language of the past is corrupt, dead

The installation was a big leap in the artists career because he went from painting more impressionistic art in the early 1900s to more cubism and then into suprematism. This relates to his pollical goals and ideas because he was an anti-communist who believed that art should be independent of political ideology. Have to take longer time to interpret the piece of art.

In Russian homes, they would put their religious icons in-between the 2 walls like this piece

• wanted to do something similar

• I believe that this was significant because it shows things in its simplest form which was what he was trying to accomplish. White represents infinity.

goal: demonstrate traditional hierarches in society and art, replacing them with something new

In the past, artists would have a subject for the piece, and he was trying to break away from this and get more of the feel and emotions of a painting without the subject matter. Wanted to separate art from the real world.

Latest state of his Suprematist works: monochromatic paintings

Complete renunciation of the physical world

White=”real concept of infinity”

It rejects all color and everything that a painting normally would have back then.

• It takes it down to the bare bones of a piece of art.

• Doesn’t have any obvious difference between the shape and background,

• white represent utopia, obvious tilt was meant to mean harmony and order, stillness to image- convey peacefulness of being and thereness

• Malevich’s view on art was increasingly at odds with the new Soviet government because they were trying to suppress their artist methods and were starting to lean towards art that followed “socialist realism”. He was in support of the revolution. 

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20-foot tower displayed in Moscow in 1920; conceived as 1300 feet high (much taller than Eiffel tower) meant to commemorate the triumph of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution and to house the offices of the Communist party

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; Tatlin believed that art whould support and reflect the new social and political order

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

Matisse wanted to enlist in WWI but couldn’t because of weak heart; encouraged to make good paintings for France as a way to show his patriotism

Influence of Cezanne and Cubism: flattening and compression of picture plane, structure

Analyze formal elements of design: unity and variety, balance, shape, line

Austere, geometric, with some curvilinear lines; balance of elements

Picasso portrays himself as Harlequin (as he often did)

Monk represents Max Jacob, writer, who had recently withdrawn from the world and taken up residence in a monastery

Also a tribute to two close friends: Pierrot represents Guillaume Apollinaire, poet who had died in 1918

Somber mood explained as the work becomes a memorial to these lost friends

As a foreigner, Pablo Picasso was able to remain in Paris during the war

Picasso came to see art as “an instrument of war against brutality and darkness”

6’x7’

Also continuing experiments with Cubism: “If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them.”

Figures from commedia dell’arte: Italian theater started in 16^th century and still performed in 20^th century; stock characters

Pierrot at left: naïve clown who is always getting his heart broken

Harlequin in middle: handsome trickster who often attracts love interests of Pierrot

 monk at right: also often included in the shows

Had been working on stage sets for Igor Stravinsky’s Pucinella, also based on Commedia dell’ Arte

Kirchner volunteered for military service at the onset of WWI in Sept 1914; discharged in 1915 after a mental breakdown; suffered alcoholism and drug abuse; committed suicide later in 1938

Kirchner never fought, and this painting is instead an exploration of the artist’s personal fears.

The severed hand in Self-Portrait As a Soldier is not a literal injury, but a metaphor.” Kirchner’s is a metaphoric, self-amputation—a potential injury, not to the body—but to his identity as an artist.

Franz Marc was killed on the western front in 1916, age 36

Right side damaged and restored by Paul Klee (friend of Marc)

Premonition of violence, destruction of WWI?

Franz Marc was a German expressionist who thought animals to be a source of spiritual harmony and purity. Around the time of World War 1, Franz Marc was greatly affected by the effects of war on the world. He often conveyed feelings of anxiety, longing, violence, and despair in his art. In his ‘Large Blue Horses’, he used a variety of bright and vibrant colors that represented different things to him. He used the color red to signify sound of violence, yellow to represent femininity and joy, and he used blue in many paintings to signify masculinity and spirituality.

In most of Franz Marc’s pieces, he depicted animals in many forms because to him, animals had a pure ‘sense of life’ and it ‘awakened all that (was) good’ in him. He believed in pantheism, and it grew as he looked at the world and was disgusted by modernity and humans and their actions. From what I have gathered in my research, he found a sense of peace in painting animals and felt it helped him see the beauty  while the world around him was filled with hatred and anger.

Franz Marc signed up to serve the German army in World War 2.  During this time, the Germany army were having artists like Franz Marc disguise weapons. He unfortunately did was struck in the head with a shell splinter and did not survive. He dead after being sent to help the front and the sad part is that he was about to be withdrawn from combat known as a notable artist.

Before he dead in battle, his works of art portrayed much of the turmoil that was going on in the world around World War 1. As years went by, Franz Marc started to realize the ‘deformity’ of nature and its ‘repulsiveness’ and his art began to portray this more and became more abstract.

Macke killed in early weeks of war, age 27

Influenced color of Franz Marc; member of Der Blaue Reiter as well

Influenced by Kandinsky, Cubism, Fauvism

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

Macke killed in early weeks of war, age 27

Macke killed in early weeks of war, age 27

Influenced color of Franz Marc; member of Der Blaue Reiter as well

Influenced by Kandinsky, Cubism, Fauvism

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

Macke killed in early weeks of war, age 27

Compelled by outbreak of war to return to Russia from Germany; worked as artist for revolutionary Russian govt. but eventually found his spiritual conception of art coming into conflict with the utilitarian doctrines of govt.

Introduces more straight or geometric lines to free-form abstraction, darker colors

Paul Klee as a soldier, 1916

Klee joined the war effort, but was spared battle, as he was employed instead as a clerk, as well as to paint camouflage on airplanes. He was also able to paint throughout the war and his work was included in many exhibits.

Series of lithographs in response to death of friends Franz Marc and August Macke

Expressionism in Austria

Adjectives?

Gutersloh was a friend, painter, and writer; animated by a nervous energy; psychology as much as human likeness

Conscripted for service in military; stationed in Prague but never saw battle; Died of flu pandemic 1918

Grief, hopelessness, despair after WWI

A poem by Lehmbruck titled "Is There Anybody Left?," written in 1918, attests to the sculptor's own feelings of despair:

Who has survived this bloodbath? I tramp over this new cut field And look at the harvest of men cruelly mown down. Friends lie silent around me; My brothers are no longer here. Faith, love, everything has disappeared, But death is everywhere, on every flower and every path. Oh limitless curses on it! You who have made so much death, Have you none for me?

Committed suicide 1919

he used to do very Curtavious, and graceful, classical nude woman before the war

• changed to doing more somber and depressed elongated men

Apollinaire: poet, playwright, art critic; promoted Cubism and coined the term Cubism and Surrealism;

Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918; he was 38.

Upon Italy’s entry into WWI, De Chirico left Paris, and returned home to Italy;

“Metaphysical School:” Haunting, dreamlike fusion of reality and unreality

he worked in the hospital in the war and didn't die there

• uses more chaotic things more than his other paintings

  • it has some things he saw around in the hospital because he painted when he was enlisted

  • feeling of death and emptiness, haunting quality

  • barricade

He was a medic in the war and didn't die there

Died of typhoid serving as a doctor on the front

he

Painted in 1915, the year Italy entered World War I, this work reflects a Futurist declaration of the same year: "War is a motor for art." Although poor health prevented Severini from enlisting in the military, he was obsessed by this first fully mechanized war. Living in Paris, he witnessed the city's bombardment, and from his studio he had an aerial view of the Denfert-Rochereau station and trains transporting soldiers, supplies, and weapons. Here, five faceless figures crouch in a militarized locomotive car, aiming their rifles in unison. Smoke from gun and cannon fire eclipse the natural landscape. Severini celebrated war, which the Futurists believed could generate a new Italian identity—one of military and cultural power.

green looks like a tank

white could represent smoke

look of machinery, was excited about war

• thought war would bring a new future

was in the front lines

Wounded in 1915, died in a riding accident while convalescing after the war

he volunteered to fight for Italy

looking for something new in his art

Futurist architect: vision of architecture and technology of the future based on industrial mechanization

Killed in battle in WWI age 28

British poet and artist; Poems from the Trenches are recognized as some of the most outstanding poetry written during WWI

Opposed to war but joined because he needed the money; died in last months of war, age 27

polish

began to believe that sculpture should leave behind the highly finished, polished style of ancient Greece and embrace a more earthy direct carving, in which the tool marks are left visible on the final work as a fingerprint of the artist

Enlisted in French army; killed in the trenches at age 23

1915 Arp started creating a type of relief sculpture using thin layers of wood shapes

Called “constructed paintings”

Medium somewhere between painting and sculpture

• Sculpture, carved in wood

Also removed from conscious design: let pencil be guided unconsciously; gave drawings to a carpenter who cut them out in wood

Curving, vaguely organic forms termed “biomorphic”; implied life, metamorphosis

Titles suggested later

Medium: Oil and metallic paint on wood

was Jean's wife

made 4 heads in polychromed wood; portraits of Arp

Reminiscent of hat stands

Medium: Metal wheel mounted on painted wood stool

Duchamp went to NYC to escape WWI

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

Challenges notion that art requires technical skill and craftsmanship; becomes art because it is “chosen” by the artist

“Assisted readymade”—some intervention by the artist

”discovery” is what makes a work of art, not the uniqueness of the object

Interpretations? Pedastol with bust?

Medium: Wood box, with three threads 39, glued to three painted canvas strips

really strong statement

• took 1 meter as a measurement

• took 3 strings and dropped them on the ground,

  • however, they fell there he cut wood to follow the line of the string

  • calls them his meters

  • challenging hierarchy and status quo

Medium: gelatin silver print of the fountain

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917:

“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

• wanted to say that this isn't art but its not

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

Medium: Ink, Graphite, and Cut and pasted painted and printed papers. 

Picabia also went to New York to escape WWI

Collaborated with Duchamp in establishing the American version of DADA

Also took up machine imagery as an emblematic mode of representation

“Almost immediately upon coming to America, it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression”

Machine Portraits: Stieglitz portrayed as a broken bellows camera (he was a photographer) gear shift in neutral: signifies the frustrations experienced by someone trying to present experimental art in America

Goth letters and title contrast between commonplace machine and ancient, noble devices for portraiture

Medium: Mechanical Head

Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head (Spirit of the Age), c. 1920: (Berlin)

Germany: war, severe restrictions on daily life, inflation; political chaos at the end of the war with Weimar Republic

Turned to art as a medium for social and political activity; took on a left-wing, pacifist, communist direction

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.”

Medium: collage artwork

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90 x 144 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin (Smarthistory: 12:00)

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

 Medium: cut-and-pasted colored paper and printed paper, oil, and pencil on paperboard

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.

He was a merz-artist who made merz-paintings and merz-drawings, and naturally, the place where he merzed—his studio and family home—was his merz-building, or Merzbau.(bau-construction)(made up merz part) Over the years, this Merzbau developed into a kind of abstract walk-in collage composed of grottoes and columns and found objects, ever-shifting and ever-expanding. It was more than just a studio; it was itself a work of art.

Schwitters worked on the Hanover Merzbau from around 1923 until 1937, when he fled to Norway to escape the threat of Nazi Germany. Sadly, in 1943, while he was in exile, it was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid

Medium: Lithograph on wove paper

Kollwitz’ youngest son had been killed just days after entering into the war in 1914

Couldn’t get into art academy in Germany because she was a woman; attended Berlin art school for women

Took up printmaking rather than painting; graphic media appealed to Kollwitz for their ability to convey a message effectively and to reach a wide audience through reproduction

Member of the November Group—group of artists with socialist aims

Devoted her life and her art to a form of protest or social criticism; concerned with the problems and sufferings of the underprivileged; married to a doctor of predominantly industrial poor of Berlin

Medium: One from a portfolio of eight woodcuts (including cover)

Produced cycles on a central theme; series of War

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

Medium: lithograph on wove paper

Kathe Kollwitz, Never Again War! 1924: (Berlin)

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

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

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

Reminds me of Liberty Leading the People (new cause)

“Be it her time or ours, we can use art to express ourselves and opinions in protest to what is being done if it is something we strongly disagree with, usually political in nature. I think people like her need to use their talents to create images for a movement.” Gerald Robinson

Medium: Bronze relief sculpture

Influenced by Ernst Barlach (friend)

Many works show a profoundly felt grief—highly emotional tenor

Medium: Lithograph

Death Seizing a Woman

Many works show a profoundly felt grief—highly emotional tenor

Form of Social Realism; also pronounced dedication to objective vs. non-objective art

not naturalistic at all

Medium: Oil on canvas

George Grosz spent 2 years in the army (1914-16) and recalled in 1917; ended military career in an asylum

was looking at medieval hellscapes as inspiration

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 colorization—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

Medium: oil-and-collage-on-canvas painting

He did serve in the war and didn't die in the war

Dix’s combat experience in WWI made him fiercely anti-militaristic;

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

• wanted to show the reality of the war

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”

Medium: painting- oil on canvas

Dix willingly joined the German army at the outset of the First World War and as a machine-gunner experienced artillery bombardment and hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches. In the early 1920s Dix felt sickened by the collective desire of so many civilians to forget the war and in response wanted to create a painting of gut-wrenching impact. The resulting frank depiction of death and dismemberment in the trenches caused a public outcry when it was bought by a Cologne museum in 1923.  

In 1937 The Trench was confiscated by the Nazi regime and included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition. This show, which proved extremely popular, vilified modernist art as mentally ill, artistically bankrupt and, especially in the case of Dix’s The Trench, unpatriotic.

In 1939 several hundred modernist artworks were burned by the authorities in an open bonfire in the Berlin fire station. For many years it was thought that Dix’s The Trench was among these. But a bill of sale to an art dealer who worked with the Nazi authorities indicates that the painting survived at least until January 1940.

What happened to it thereafter is not known. The work may have been looted amid the confusion of the end of the war, but no trace of it has been found over the last seventy years.

Medium: oil on canvas

Service in WWI brought about a nervous breakdown, and, as he later said, “great injury to his soul”

Searched for internal reality

Over 85 self portraits throughout his life

In Frankfurt studio: haunted and anxious

Medium: Oil on canvas, three panels

Heavily symbolic, monumental (triptych=church altarpiece precedents)

Left: torture chamber; right: frustration, bondage, indecision

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

“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

influence of post impressionism= Paul Cézanne and the analytical approach he took to painting landscapes, people and objects inspired many artists to embrace order and structure instead.

• broken colors applied with short brushstrokes

• They rejected the idea of being spontaneous and naturalistic in the use of light and forms

• Post-Impressionism, led by Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, was a reaction against Impressionism and its concern for the accurate depiction of light and color. Instead, Post-Impressionists sought to convey their feelings and ideas through bolder colors and sharper contrasts. This emphasis on emotion and expression was a major influence on the Fauves, who used bright colors to convey the intensity of their feelings.

“Donatello au milieu des fauves!”—Louis Vauxcelles, on Gallery VII of the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris

Fauvism is an art movement that began in the early 20th century. It is characterized by the use of bright colors and bold brushstrokes.

Donatello among the wild beasts

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1928: (Smarthistory: 2:38)*

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

“All my life I have sought the essence of flight. Don’t look for mysteries. I give you pure joy. Look at the sculptures until you see them. Those nearest to God have seen them.”

Constantin Brancusi

Writing topic: In trial regarding Brancusi’s piece as it came through U.S. Customs for 1936 show at MOMA called “Cubism and Abstract Art” (they thought it was a piece of industrial equipment and therefore should be taxed): Does art need to be “beautiful”? Explain

Duchamp fascinated by moving pictures and stop-action photography  by Marey

Synthetic Cubist works use simplified geometric shapes. 

Synthetic Cubist works use brighter colors than the more austere Analytical Cubism phase. 

Synthetic Cubist works often include real elements like newspaper or other patterned paper that are collaged into the painting. 

Synthetic Cubist works have an overall flatness of perspective. 

Synthetic Cubist works depict subject matter from multiple points of view. 

Picasso, Van Gogh included in works confiscated from museums as degenerate

• Ernst Barlach

• Max Beckmann

• Marc Chagall

• Otto Dix

• Max Ernst

• George Grosz

• Raoul Hausmann

• Erich Heckel

• Wassily Kandinsky

• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

• Paul Klee

• Wilhelm Lehmbruck

• Franz Marc

• Piet Mondrian

• Emil Nolde

• Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

• Kurt Schwitters
  
  

How did the video make you feel? Art hanging crooked? Art of mentally ill?

• 4,829 artworks burned in a public bonfire; the rest were auctioned in switzerland

used by the Nazi Party to describe modern art they considered to be immoral, un-German, and Jewish. The Nazis banned this art and removed it from state-owned museums

Defined as:

• The Nazis defined degenerate art as an "insult to German feeling

• They also considered it to be un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. 

• Max Nordau coined the term "degenerate art" as a way to describe a social contagion that spread "immoral" ideas. 

What were the consequences for degenerate artists? 

• Artists identified as degenerate were dismissed from their teaching positions.

• They were forbidden from exhibiting or selling their art.

• In some cases, they were forbidden from producing art.

The Nazis considered modern art styles to be degenerate and promoted traditional art that supported their values of militarism, racial purity, and obedience. 

Medium: oil on canvas

Who are some artists he might have seen since 1905?

Influences: Impressionism (broken color), Post-Impressionism (bold brushstrokes, flattened)

• Fauvism

Expressive brushwork reminiscent of Van Gogh

Pointillist—like Seurat

Pulsates with energy

one of the first paintings in which Mondrian applied to a natural subject the principles of cubist composition that he was in the process of assimilating and working out in his own way

Moved to Paris in early 1912; became acquainted with works by Picasso and Braque in Cubist style

While Mondrian was deeply influenced by Cubism when he was in Paris, he felt that the style “did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries: it was not developing abstraction toward its ultimate goal, the expression of pure reality.”
What do you think Mondrian meant by the “logical consequences of its own discoveries” (regarding Cubism)?

Medium: oil on canvas

Went to Holland to visit his father; forced to stay in Holland when war broke out one week later

Disheartened by war; felt that nationalism led to war and wanted to create a pure, international style that transcended nationality; utopian ideas about what art could do

Dynamic balance of verticals and horizontals; eliminated all curving lines

Yet it bothered him that the shapes still felt that they had depth and that the colors were the foreground and the white was the background

Started enclosing color with heavy lines; color and space as complete entities, not foregrounds and backgrounds

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dynamic balance of vertical and horizontal structure, using primary hues and black and white

Everything in the painting holds its place; the grays are as assertive as the reds or yellows; they advance as well as recede.

The painting is not flat. Everything is held firmly in place, but under great tension.

Medium: Oil on canvas

Style:

• Mondrian's work is considered abstract real painting. 

• He used basic elements of design, such as color and line, to create a sense of unity and harmony. 

• He believed that abstraction provided a truer picture of reality than naturalistic depictions. 

Composition:

• The painting is an exercise in asymmetry, with each square a different size and color. 

• The black lines that dominate the painting act as planes of pigment, rather than outlines. 

• The red square balances beautifully with the blue and yellow rectangles, though they are much smaller in size. 

Medium: Oil on canvas

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. II, 1930: (Mondrian at Tate Liverpool and Turner Contemporary: 4:33)

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

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

Mondrian based art on this theory; called it Neo Plasticism

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

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

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

Cubist influence; also stained glass

a style of abstraction using simple geometric shapes, primary colors, and clean lines

"Neo-Plasticism"; this style significantly influenced the "International Style" of architecture, particularly through its emphasis on minimalism and functionalism, as seen in the works of architects like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. 

Meaning

• "De Stijl" is Dutch for "The Style," and "Neo-Plasticism" translates to "new plastic art," referring to the movement's focus on pure, basic forms

Core elements:

• Straight lines, right angles, primary colors (red, yellow, blue), black and white, and rectangular shapes are the defining elements of De Stijl artwork

Medium: oil on canvas

Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1944 (died shortly after); loved energy of New York, jazz, rhythms

Details

• The painting is made up of horizontal and vertical lines of squares and rectangles in the colors red, blue, yellow, white, and gray. 

• The painting's title combines "Broadway", a busy street with theaters, and "Boogie-woogie", a jazz music genre that Mondrian discovered and loved. 

• Mondrian fled Europe during World War II and found refuge in New York City. He was introduced to boogie-woogie music on his first night in Manhattan. 

Medium: brick, concrete, steel, render, and timber

Design features

• The house's facades are a collage of different colored and textured planes and lines. 

• The house's windows and doors open at 90 degrees. 

• The house's interior walls are sliding partitions that can be collapsed to create an open living area. 

Gerrit Rietveld, Schroder House

Start video at “De Stijl Movement”

Intended for mass prRietveld believed that there was a greater goal for the furniture designer than just physical comfort: the well-being and comfort of the spirit.

Rietveld and his de Stijl colleagues—including the movement’s most famous theorist and practitioner, Piet Mondrian—sought to create a utopia based on a harmonic human-made order, which they believed could renew Europe after the devastating turmoil of World War I.

New forms, in their view, were essential to this rebuilding

Production (which never took place)

Medium: painted wood

Piet Mondrian, Composition C (No. III):

• medium: oil on canvas

• Explanation

  • Mondrian was a Dutch artist who was a leader in the Neo-Plasticism movement. His work is known for its use of primary colors, black lines, and geometric shapes. Mondrian believed that abstraction could express ideas more truthfully than realistic depictions. 

• Technique

  • Mondrian's paintings are made up of squares, rectangles, lines, and right angles. He used black lines to define the borders of the colored rectangles. The painting is mostly white, with blocks of red, yellow, and blue. The colors are distributed asymmetrically to create balance. 

  • Purpose

    • Mondrian's work was intended to symbolize the relationship between the individual and the collective. He believed that his abstraction could serve as a universal pictorial language. 

They both horizon line is similar, use of primary colors, three figures, both oil

Name given by the artist Kazimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913 characterised by basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colours

goal: The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on visual depiction of objects.

Bauhaus school of art operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts, fine arts, and technology

What were influences on Bauhaus philosophy?

What did Bauhaus philosophy influence in turn?

The school was founded by Walter Gropius, a German architect. The Bauhaus was a leader in the Modern Movement, which influenced 20th century architecture. 

What did the Bauhaus do? 

• Combined fine arts and applied arts

• Emphasized function and mass production

• Used new materials like steel, glass, and reinforced concrete

• Rejected traditional historical symbols of representation

• Created a geometric, abstract style

What happened to the Bauhaus?

• The Bauhaus was closed in 1933 due to pressure from the Nazis 

• Bauhaus members emigrated to other countries, including the United States, Switzerland, Russia, and Israel 

• The Bauhaus movement continued, influencing architects, designers, and artists 

Bauhaus school of art operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts, fine arts, and technology

Began in Weimar, moved to Dessau, and finally Berlin

Architecture meant to embody the  principles of simplicity and design

Medium: Letterpress

Bayer developed a distinctive typography: lower-case, sans-serif type

He helped to develop the new field of graphic design

He wanted to erase the distinction between fine art and commercial art

Wanted to erase the distinction between fine art and commercial art

Helped to develop the new field of graphic design (form + function)

Josef Albers’s paper sculpture exercise

Goal: Create a paper sculpture using the same constraints Josef Albers issued to his students at the Bauhaus

• Take a plain white piece of paper

• Use folds and cuts to shape the material

• Create as little waste as possible.

• Do not use glue

First tubular steel chair; got idea from riding his bicycle

Simple, functional, reproduceable designs; also beautiful and affordable and comfortable (supposed to be at least)

• came up with it while he was on his bike

Explanation

• Marcel Breuer was a German-born furniture designer and teacher at the Bauhaus art and design school. 

• The Bauhaus school embraced industrial production and a machine aesthetic. 

• Breuer's work is considered one of the best-known examples of industrial production. 

• The B33 armchair is made of chrome-plated tubular steel with a steel-thread seat and back. 

• The chair's structural framework is made up of straight horizontal and vertical members. 

• The seat is made of soft fabric that slopes down toward the back. 

The stylistic lens examines how a work of art fits into an art movement or what makes an artist's work unique.

The formal lens focuses on the elements and principles of design--what you can see without knowing anything else about the work.

The iconographical lens points to subject matter and symbolism.

The social-historical lens covers the trends in culture that drive the artist's choices, such as who commissioned the art, religious influences, and historical events.

The power-relations lens asks questions about power hierarchies in terms of subject matter or accessibility of the artist to the resources given to those in power. 

The biographical lens looks at how details of the artist's life may have affected the artist's choices in the work.

We use the art-historical lens to look at how art of the past influenced the artist's choices.

The personal/spiritual lens gives us a chance to reflect on our own experience with the artwork, including the emotional reactions, thoughts, and inspiration we draw from it.

Design should be simple, functional, and reproduceable.

Design should be beautiful and affordable

Josef Albers’s paper sculpture exercise

Goal: Create a paper sculpture using the same constraints Josef Albers issued to his students at the Bauhaus

• Take a plain white piece of paper

• Use folds and cuts to shape the material

• Create as little waste as possible.

• Do not use glue

Medium: Tempera on Masonite

Apprenticed in a stained glass workshop; interest in problems of light and color within geometric formats

Used grid patterns with glass fragments; invented a painstaking technique of sand-blasting and painting thin layers of glass which he then baked in a kiln

make of Glass

he wanted to be true to the material, so if he worked with glass, it would look like glass

Take a plain white piece of paper.

Use folds and cuts to shape the material.

Create as little waste as possible.

Do not use glue.

Become well-acquainted with art medium.

Be “true” to your materials.

“Less is more.”

Medium: Oil and tempera on canvas mounted on cardboard

He became at teacher at Bauhaus January 1921 to to April 1931

Seldom completely abstract; loved nature

Saw creative act as a magical experience (fellow faculty member Anni Albers said everything he touched was magic)

Wanted to combine outer experience of the world with inner vision, which was expressed in the very process of creation

Anni Albers told the story of the celebrations at the Bauhaus for Klee’s fiftieth birthday in 1929 (as recounted in Nicholas Fox Weber’s In The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism). Hiring a Junkers aeroplane, manufactured locally in Dessau, she and other students parachuted an angel-shaped package of gifts onto the roof of Klee’s house. Much as inspiration seemed to fall from the sky, so did praise;

Details showing texture, sgraffito—scratching out (oil on canvas)

Incorporate play into artwork.

View the creative act as a magical experience.

Combine the outer experience of the world with an inner vision, which can be expressed in the very process of creation.

Triadic Ballet:

• Medium: Gouache, ink, and cut-and-pasted gelatin silver prints on black paper

Abstract figure

• Medium: bronze

Taught design, sculpture, mural painting but passion was theater; set up experimental Theater Workshop

Triadic Ballet: dancers encased in colored, geometric shapes made from wood, metal, and cardboard; transformed performers into abstracted, kinetic sculptures

Clarity of form, geometric precision of machine

• interested in simplicity

Art can be made with basic materials

Transformation of dancers into abstracted, kinetic sculptures

Emphasis on clarity of form and the geometric precision of machines

medium: oil on canvas

Hard-edge shapes have taken over organic forms

he could hear in color

Believed that abstract forms had great expressive power and spirituality

Explanation

• Composition VIII is an abstract oil painting that is part of Kandinsky's Compositions series. It is considered one of his most iconic works and is part of the permanent collection at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. 

• Kandinsky's radical style was well-received at the Bauhaus, where he was able to explore the relationship between colors and forms and their psychological and spiritual effects. The painting is an example of the Bauhaus aesthetic, which combines abstract art with the ethos of the Bauhaus movement. 

• Kandinsky was inspired by the geometric forms promoted by other artists, such as Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Liubov Popova. 

Medium: Oil on Masonite

Albers=Black Mountain College (4:34)

started making this for his students in 1950

Emigrated to US and became one of most important art teachers in the US, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and then Yale

Explored issues of perception, illusionism, and interaction of abstract pictorial elements

Homage to Square: formula derived in 1950 where he explored the relationships of color squares confined within squares; predetermined asymmetry

Taught color theory at Yale

• color's absolute relativity. Albers insisted that “color, as the most relative medium in art, has innumerable faces or appearances.

By restricting himself to this format, he sought to demonstrate the subtle perceptual ambiguities that occur when colors are juxtaposed

did nearly 1,000 of these

• was about studying color

• how it changes your perception of the color when you change it up

• telling us that color is relative

• how other colors affect each other

Abstract forms have great expressive power

here is a spiritual, universal connection between shape and color

Triangles are inherently yellow, circles are inherently blue, and squares are inherently red (not all of his colleagues agreed!)

Color affects colors around it

color can be subjective

László Moholy-Nagy, Light-Space Modulator, 1921-30

• made of metal and glass

Photogram, c. 1940

• Gelatin silver photogram

Kinetic sculpture (machine-like, moving parts)

• the structure, the shadow shapes

Interested in light, space, and motion, machines

Stressed scientific investigation in the classroom

Constructivist ideals: alliance of art and technology

Interest in light, space, and motion

Alliance between art and technology

encouraged Scientific investigation in the classroom

Medium: Cotton, wool, and linen fibers

Rhythm of bands embody rhythm of moving shuttle back and forth in weaving; unity between artisan and work

Only woman in charge of a Bauhaus workshop;

Though initially women were to be given equal status at the Bauhaus, Gropius grew alarmed at the number of women applicants and restricted them primarily to weaving

First established in Weimar, the school moved to Dessau in 1925, occupying a programmatic building by Gropius, then to Berlin in 1932.

Its closure by the Nazis in April 1933 put an end to its activities in Europe, forcing its members into American exile and paradoxically bringing about the international diffusion of its thought.

• wanted to put an end to all this modernism

• a lot of the teachers moved to the United States and started teaching there

  • Black Mountain college - American version of Bauhaus

    • Josef Alberts taught at yale

Medium: oil on canvas

The stylistic period of this work is

• The Ashcan School

This work by George Bellows is significant because

• It shows one of the few social settings where people of different skin colors could interact closely.

George Bellows, Both Members of This Club, 1909

• The Ashcan School

• What is significant about the racial dynamics in this work?

  • My first impression of this piece was not very great; I saw two men fighting and I assumed it was just a painting with subject matter I would not find interesting. However, upon further research, I discovered something that caused me to really love the painting. George Bellows painted a fight club, and at the time, fight clubs were one of very few organizations where African-Americans and Caucasians could interact closely. The painting was created in 1909, and, considering all of the segregation that occurred in the United States up until the 1950’s and 60’s, and racial prejudices that still occur today, it was amazing to me that there was a place in 1909 where both races could interact. On the other hand, it is astounding to me that there would ever be a separation of races, because I believe that everyone . . . deserves the same opportunities.

Medium: oil on canvas

This abstract painting by Marsden Hartley was supposed to

• Function as a portrait

Lived abroad; first in Paris and then in Berlin--influenced by Kandinky and The Blue Rider group

Karl Von Freyburg’s initials, “Kv.F,” are included in the lower left of the painting (left).

The red number four on a dark blue field (below) refers to von Freyburg’s military regiment, and the yellow “24” refers to his age at the time of his death.

• 4 represents his regiment

The silver star connecting to a serpentine line near the yellow 24 is a boot spur, referring to von Freyburg’s position as a cavalry officer (above). Finally, the stylized cross with white trim is a German Iron Cross—a medal awarded to soldiers who demonstrated exceptional valor.

Hartley’s painting is also more than a portrait of an individual: it expresses the rising German nationalism that he witnessed while living in Berlin. The diagonal blue and white checkerboard pattern  is a reference to the flag of Bavaria, and so too are the pair of blue and white stripes on the right side of the image. The red, white, and black stripes on the bottom third of the canvas represent a Kriegsschiffgösch or German naval war flag, turned upside-down. This flag typically had a black cross in the middle of it, but Hartley omitted  this element so as to bring compositional importance to the medal in the upper part of the painting. Beneath the German flag are the standards of two of Germany’s enemies: the red and white St. George’s Cross of England, and the black, yellow, and red tricolor of Belgium.

Why is this photograph by Alfred Stieglitz often called the first modern photograph?

• A. Because it shows a scene of real life rather than characters posing for a scene

• B. Because it focuses on line, shape, and formal elements rather than a story

• C. Because it shows different classes above and below board

modern because

• Focus on line, shape, formal elements rather than a story

  • bottom class stayed on lower deck while upper class got to be on top deck

  • wanted to capture the moment

  • it shows a contemporary issue of class distinction

  • it emphasizes the mechanical recording rather than using painterly effects

  • the artist captures a real-life moment rather than carefully posing his models

Each of these statements emphasizes a sense of isolation in this work EXCEPT

• Two figures sit close to each other.

Each of these statements emphasizes a sense of isolation\

• None of the figures looks at the others.

• The street and nearby store are completely empty.

• There is no visible entrance.

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

The artist later said, “Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

Isolation:   Sealed off from us– no way in

•   No eye contact

• Empty street and building

• Two urns mirror the two sitting together: together but also apart

• Four figures framed by vertical supports in the glass

Though Hopper masterfully paints a realistic and picturesque image, that is not where the worth of this piece lies. Its value lies in the subtle hints at isolation and loneliness that each of us can feel even in a room full of people. He illustrates the feeling of being lost inside ourselves and in a place that we know we should not be. This piece moved me because of its timeless imagery, its deep emotional message, and its ability to make the viewer feel something.

This painting by Frida Kahlo portrays each of the following EXCEPT

• Organ transplant donors

this was after she and Diego divorced, she has a picture of him in her locket and its portraying a broken heart

was really interested in family history

showing the 2 sides of herself, her roots and who she is now

the clapping could be symbolizing the cut off of that side of her life, her marriage

• they remarried in her terms the second time around

she married him at 22yrs the first time and Diego was 43 yrs

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939: began painting while recovering from a bus accident at age 18; interested in native folk art and dress; introspective and about emotional and physical pain

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

European Frida cuts the blood connection to the indigenous self

Expresses strength in the face of hardship: the vein creates a continuous but sometimes hidden line that leads our eye to her broken heart (allusions to her divorce and also to her life of pain)

two seated figures holding hands and sharing a bench in front of a stormy sky.

This series by Jacob Lawrence comes from a stylistic period known as

• The Harlem Renaissance

What is the medium used for this series by Jacob Lawrence?

•  Tempera and Hardboard
  

an artistic movement in the United States during the late 19th-early 20th century^[1] that produced works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods.

The artists working in this style included Robert Henri (1865–1929), George Luks (1867–1933), William Glackens (1870–1938), John Sloan (1871–1951), and Everett Shinn (1876–1953)

Medium: oil on canvas

Style: Considered an example of American realism, showcasing Henri's interest in capturing everyday urban life. 

Artist's background: Robert Henri was a prominent figure in the Ashcan School of art, known for his gritty depiction of urban scenes. 

deviates from impressionist urban snow scenes of the period in several ways: it represents a common side street rather than a major avenue; there is nothing narrative, anecdotal, or prettified about the image; the straightforward, one-point perspective composition is devoid of trivial details; the exceptionally daring, textured brushwork resembles a preparatory study rather than a finished oil painting; and the somber palette creates a dark, oppressive atmosphere.

Medium: oil on canvas

Penn Station was a huge, classical structure that celebrated new transportation technology, yet Bellows shows the underside of that technology

Hundreds of families were displaced (mostly African American)

Shows the dirt, grit, acidic colors

a cultural and artistic movement in the United States that began in the early 20th century

Art

• Artists rejected realistic approaches to art and experimented with color, shapes, and abstraction. 

• Some artists, like Georgia O'Keeffe, created large-scale, abstracted paintings of flowers, leaves, and trees. 

• Other artists, like Stuart Davis, adopted Cubist and Surrealist techniques. 

• Some artists, like Edward Hopper and Oscar Bluemner, drew inspiration from specific urban locations. 

Social impact 

• American modernism reflected the experiences of the modern industrial world and the concerns of the American people

Medium: Lithograph

Created a sensation; powerful impetus for the advancement of modernism: almost immediately, there was evidence of change in American art and collecting

focused on the themes of industrialization and modernization in the American landscape, using precise, sharply defined geometrical forms.

Balance of abstraction and accuracy: Precisionist art bridges the gap between realism and abstraction. 

emphasized geometric forms and industrial subjects

very precise

has to do with subject matter- machines, technology

• not only because of precise line, but also because of precision of machines and industry; unlike Cubism, not distorted

Talk more about each style period

Medium: oil,chalk,graphite,board

Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927

Influences of Cubism reaches US

Grain elevators

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

Title: Americas pyramids; mighty (time of plenty)

Williams was an ‘Imaginist’ poet and sought to express ideas in the most direct, succinct manner possible; an approach that Demuth here approximates in painting. The artist breaks down the space, line and colour of the image to their most symbolic components.

Medium: oil, ink, and gold leaf on board

Charles Demuth

Inspired by Cubism, Futurism, a poem by William Carlos Williams

Williams was an ‘Imaginist’ poet and sought to express ideas in the most direct, succinct manner possible; an approach that Demuth here approximates in painting. The artist breaks down the space, line and colour of the image to their most symbolic components.

With crisp lines and bold colours, Demuth evokes the experience of the poem: slashes of grey, black and white speak of the ‘rain/and lights’ while striking reds and golds suggest the ‘gong clangs/siren howls/and wheels rumbling.’The number 5 seems to both recede and speed forward in the geometric space of Ninth Avenue (the avenue where Williams recalled he had seen the fire engine that inspired his poem). The roundness of the lights, corner arcs and the number 5 play off the straight lines of the fire engine, buildings and rays of light, creating an atmosphere of rushing energy.

Demuth often tailored his style to suit his subject: in paintings of nature his approach is often delicate and lyrical, while his urban subjects, like this one, are treated much like a machine: controlled, clean and hard-edged. This style, called Precisionism, incorporated various influences – such as the splintered planes of French Cubism and the mechanical ethos of Italian Futurism, which Demuth knew from his travels in Europe – however, its uniquely New York subject interpreted through Demuth’s literal precision resulted in something decidedly American.

This painting by Charles Demuth pays homage to the American poet

• William Carlos Williams

This painting shows the influence of each of the following EXCEPT

• D. Nature

  
  

have strong outline, get so close up that its abstract

focus on composition, and elements of design

Medium: oil on canvas

Simplified, precisionist view

Art Deco building completed just 3 years before; view from her window

The painting can also be read as a double portrait of Steiglitz and O'Keeffe; Stieglitz is represented by the Scientific American Building, as indicated by his name in red, and O'Keeffe by the Radiator Building.

medium: oil on canvas

Sold for 44.4 million in 2014,  breaking record for female artist (last record was 11.9 million by Joan Mitchell)

• She said New Yorkers are too busy to stop and look at a flower so she would paint them big so they had to stop and look

Overall record 450 million (Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci?)

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

• had to sell it to uphold the costs of the museum

New Mexico imagery

Surrealist juxtaposition

Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Iris III, 1926:

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

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

Critics felt it had sexual references

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

Her abstract shapes derive from a close observation of organic objects

Often play upon the relationship between positive and negative space, which becomes symbolic of the natural ebb and flow of life

Medium: Painted steel wire and sheet aluminum

Alexander Calder, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, 1939:

• mobile- a sculpture that moves in response to air currents or motors.

American, settled in Paris, befriended Miro and Mondrian

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

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

• blurring lines in art forms

Like many aspiring artists of his generation, Calder then spent time in Paris where he was inspired by Joan Miró's work and absorbed the playfulness of Dada. Indeed, it was the French artist Marcel Duchamp who christened Calder's hanging sculptures "mobiles."

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

Like synthetic Cubism

• most likely non-objective

  • meant to him:

    • exactment, energy, nonstop rhythms of NYC, sensory feelings

Marley Staker: Stuart Davis’ painting “Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—Seventh Avenue Style” embodies several of the principles of design including balance, depth, and repetition and variation. The composition is asymmetrical but the shapes and colors make it very balanced. The overlapping and juxtaposition in this composition gives a sense of depth. It almost appears as thought there are multiple layers that are being revealed. Lastly, Davis uses repetition and variation to bring this piece to life. He uses many patterns each with their own repeating shapes. He also uses many different shapes, some similar to others but none are the same. His awareness and use of these principles make his work effective and interesting to look at.

According to Davis, this work is a “product of everyday experience in the new lights, speeds, and spaces of the American environment . . . . It is called ‘hot’ because of its dynamic mood, as opposed to a serene or pastoral mood. Six colors . . . are used as the instruments in a musical composition might be . . .”

Like Kandinsky, but also different: Kandinsky wanted to take you out of the material world, and Davis wanted to distil the experience of being in the modern world.

Stylistic analysis: focus on African heritage, ancient Egyptian influences

Formal analysis: geometric shapes, bright colors, complementary color palet, emphasis in movement, emphasis on shape

Iconography: bondage of African slaves, star- symbolizing North Star, stairs symbolizing old-middle- and new kingdoms, purple- royalty, woman- mother of Egypt

Social-Historical: Embracing black history, made for 100yrs sentential, during times of segregation, symbolizing famous people

Power-relations: discrimination, hope for a better future

Biographical: inspired by published piece "A New Negro"

Art-Historical: African Masks, 2 modern men set example for society

Medium: tempera on hardboard

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

Significance

• The Migration Series is considered a landmark in modern art. 

• It offers a new vision of the contemporary Black experience. 

Medium: Tempera on harboard

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

• The Migration of the Negro series is a 60-panel series that documents the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities. 

• Lawrence originally intended the series to educate children about the history of the migration. 

  
  

an American art movement that focused on local subjects and traditions

Subject matter

• Regionalist art often depicted rural scenes, American folklore, and the Great Depression. 

Style

• Regionalist art was a realist style that rejected European abstraction

Medium:oil on beaverwood painting

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

Window into Midwest world where Wood grew up and lived

What can you tell about these people?

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

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

Neat and clean: crisp drawing, verticals and horizontals

Industrious: pitchfork, plants on porch

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

Medium: Oil on Masonite

Grant Wood, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931

Deliberately naïve and folksy, in contrast to the prevailing trends towards modernism and abstraction

Influenced by study of German Neue Sachlickheit (New Objectivity) and Flemish portraits

Bird’s eye view of a New England town on the historic night of April 18, 1775—the start of the Revolutionary War

Paul Revere on horse, riding out to warn the colonists of the approach of the British

Midwestern subjects

Medium: Egg tempera and oil

Rhythm, movement of rolling hills echoed in trees and clouds

Influenced by Diego Rivera, Renaissance, El Greco

Influenced Jackson Pollock

What messages do you see?

• Work behind modern city life

Medium: Tempera and crayon on board

an art movement that depicts reality to criticize social and political issues

How it's used 

• Artists used social realism to highlight the poor and working class's conditions

• They aimed to challenge the systems that caused these conditions

• Their work often portrayed subjects as symbols of strength

produced by painters, printmakers, photographers, writers and filmmakers that aims to draw attention to the real socio-political conditions of the working class as a means to critique the power structures behind these conditions.

Medium: horizontal oil painting on canvas

Social realism: alienation due to urbanization and industrialization

NY; alienation associated with life in the big city in modern America

Emptiness; frozen; apartment dwellers inside individual spaces

Harsh lighting; like a stage setting

Here is a nice analysis of the formal qualities of this painting by Claire Fink:

I love Edward Hopper's painting, Early Sunday Morning. I am going to talk about the elements and principles of design in this piece that make it effective. The element of shape is used well in this painting. The whole painting is a bunch of basic shapes that make up a scene. The element of size is also used well. There is a good variation in size with the sizes of the windows on the upper and lower floors. There is a nice texture in the painting. His brushstrokes are visible in some areas while they are not in others. The texture of the sky is much different from the texture of the drapings in front of the windows. The element of color is used with a variation of colors. The colors are warmer in the top half of the painting, where the light is stronger, and it's cooler in the bottom half where there is less light. The value also changes with the lighting. The shadows are portrayed well with the dramatic lighting. I love the long shadows coming from the top window and the fire hydrant.

 The principle of balance is used with the symmetry of the building. The windows and doors make it symmetrical. The principle of repetition is apparent with the windows while there is also variation with the colors and shapes in the windows. There is a nice contrast between light and dark making the painting interesting. I think what gives the piece harmony is the repetition of shapes and colors. Some objects in the piece are more detailed or have more light, like the post or the middle curtains, which makes them dominant over other objects or shapes. These elements and principles of design make this painting both easy and interesting to look at.

Grant from FSA (Farm Security Administration) under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal

Captures destitution, emotional distress of migrant workers

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

Medium: oil and tempera on Masonite

Diego Rivera, Flower Carrier, 1935 SFMOMA

Echoed forms of Aztec and Mayan art

• The painting depicts a man's struggle to meet societal expectations of labor-intensive work. It is considered a masterpiece that transcends time and space. 

Medium: oil painting on masonite. 

Stylistic: Mexican art

formal: scale between the girl and flowers, flowers are abstract/larger than life, oil on Masonite

iconography: shows the mourning/ hardness of life, looking like she may be praying

Social-historical: everyday scene of Mexican market possibly would look like

Power-relations: peasants vs. the upper-class or plenty

Biographical: Homecoming to Mexico influenced him and his work

Art-Historical: Studied in Europe

Stylistic: World War 2 propaganda

Formal: dramatic proportions of human body, can still see through to the canvas, perspective of her looking up makes her seem powerful

Iconography: represented all woman, symbolism of serpent

Social-historical: woman entering the workforce during and right before the war

Power-relations: Patriotism vs. communism like unto masculinity vs femininity

Biographical: Rockwell himself was serving through his art

Art-historical: looks like a Madona and child reference, Americans connections to the war and ability to take over

Rockwell chose a riveter, a low-end blue collar job, and elevated it to an almost idealized status. For Rosie’s pose and form, he referenced Michelangelo’s painting of Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, even going so far as to leave in Isaiah’s halo, promoting the manual laborer to the same degree as a saint. Beyond this, Rockwell employs the pneumatic tube of Rosie’s rivet gun as a symbol of a serpent being crushed underfoot. This implies that honest work, however humble, can stamp out the serpent of Nazism. However for me, this implies that honest work can stamp out THE SERPENT, as in Lucifer.... Here, Norman Rockwell shows that we can overcome Satan in small and simple ways each day as we strive to make an honest living and be of service to our communities and our fellow man

Dutch art movement that promoted abstract art based on geometric lines and primary colors

Characteristics

• Abstraction: De Stijl artists rejected naturalistic representation in favor of a stripped-down style. 

• Geometry: De Stijl art is based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals. 

• Colors: De Stijl art uses primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, in block form. 

• Application: De Stijl was applied to painting, architecture, and a wide range of designed objects, including furniture and clothing. 

Interest in problem of real space vs. spatial illusion

We read  space, but we know that the painting on the easel is flat, and then we remember that the whole painting itself is also flat

What is real? Play on illusion implies that the painting is less real than the landscape, when in fact both are painted fictions

Medium: oil on canvas

Formal:

• horizontal focal points strong

Iconographic:

• mama is the cactus

• papa is the yellow figure could represent caution

• washland can show time passing

Social-Historical

• surrealism is a strong movement at the time

Power-relations

• father withdraws due to trauma

Biographical

• may have been to show anti trauma

Art-Historical

• comparative to Georgio, war

Psychoanalytic

• anxiety and trauma

Some Surrealists worked in a highly naturalistic style in order to capture the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of dreams (believed to be a link to the subconscious)

Illusionism of Renaissance perspective

Attempted to picture the desires and fears contained in the unconscious (which Freud said was both pointless and impossible)

Self-taught; said two De Chirico paintings in the window of the dealer Paul Guillaume and decided to become a painter

Certain characteristics common for rest of career: infinite-perspective depth: graded color, sharp horizon line

Ambiguous organic shapes in a barren dreamscape

stylistic

• oil on canvas

Formal

• horizontal focal points= strong

Iconographic

• mama is the cactus

• papa is the yellow figure

• wasteland can show time passing

medium: made of sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas

Scarred physically, emotionally, spiritually by experiences in WWI: almost fatally injured, hospitalized for a long time; continued to rage against the insanity of humankind and society until he was confined for a while to a mental hospital

Works express his emotions and relate to brutality of human beings and all living things

Sand painting: applied glue to canvas, then threw sand over the surface and brushed away excess

Automatic process—allows chance to help determine his composition

Emigrated from Paris to NY

Stylistic

oil on canvas

Interest in the unconscious as a source of creativity and of truth; what is real?

Reflection or model? Surface reality and inner reality; Altar ego; depths of soul

Cubist fractures, curvilinear rhythms, brilliant color patterns

Formal

• oil on canvas

Iconographic

• mirrors symbolizes reality and maturity

• difference between subconscious and unconscious

• fear of loss or decay

• soft curving shapes- symbolizing how she saw this woman

power - relations

• shows how woman would look at herself

  • body dysmorphia

  • self vs self

Biographical

• a painting of Picasso's lover

  • he was married at the time as well

Psychoanalytic

• mortality

• dark twist to it

• maturity vs. youth

Medium: Oil with painted wood elements and cut-and-pasted printed paper on wood with wood frame

Dream landscape

Two girls are frightened by a tiny bird (one is collapsed, one holds a knife)

Real and illusion: knob and gate and part of house are 3-D; man on roof—trying to get out of dream?

stylistic

• emotional detachment

• trauma

Formal

oil on canvas

he is from Spain

Playful—teems with life (like Bosch?)

Animating the inanimate was a favorite Surrealist theme; even inanimate objects have eager vitality

Mapped out compositions with a grid

Biographical

• Joan Miró, Carnival of Harlequin, 1924-25, Albright-Knox Art Gallery located in Buffalo New York

• This is the Carnival of Harlequin, painted by Joan Miró in his studio in Paris between 1924 and 1925.

• The painting is currently on display in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery located in Buffalo New York

• The painting was featured in Miro's first exhibition in Paris in 1925

  • It ranged from the complexity of Carnival of Harlequin to more simple paintings like Dog Barking at the Moon. All Surrealism in different ways.

• This is one of his most famous works and a key example of Surrealist painting

• The Carnival of Harlequin is considered the highest point in Miro's personal surrealist style

• Miro liked to paint the subconscious but also things from his own life experience and memories

Stylistic

•  One of the first surrealist paintings shows Miros’ playful sense of caprice

• Carnival of Harlequin is the first painting in which Joan Miro's playfulness is fully realized. 

•  Animating the inanimate was a popular theme for surrealism

Formalistic

• This painting was done with oil on canvas.

• As a Surrealism painting, it uses various shapes and colors to stand out amongst a flat background.

• His creatures in the painting are all evenly spread out across the whole painting

  • Our eyes are done aligning to one place

  • Other characters fill the rest of the painting doing the most random things. 

• Miro used red lines arranged in a diagonal grid to map out his composition

  • It can still be seen through the paint

• Even the objects and bright colors featured have their vividness to share. 

Iconography

• The harlequin has a hole in his stomach, which may refer to Miró's own hunger and poverty at the time.

• Green sphere on the right to him represents globe, he was obsessed with idea of “conquering the world”

• The cat in the painting represents Miros own cat

•  Black triangle represents Eiffel Tower

•  Ladder for Miro, was a symbol of transcendence and a bridge to another, unearthly realm

  • Dark and alien placed the resembles a dream scene

  • Symbol of flight, evasion, elevation

  • A ladder on the left is skewed slightly, traveling upward till it gets to a small, disembodied eye at the top. 

•   His face also looks like a harlequin with a half-and-half of red and blue. 

• Overall, these colorful characters and objects in a beige background fill the space with a sense of whimsy. 

Art-Historical

• Harlequin refers to a well-known Italian comic theater character and is resembled to a guitar in this painting

Social-Historical

•  He used sources beyond his own imagination for his imagery

•  Carnival refers to Mardi Gras, celebration occurs before fasting of lent

•  Andre Breton formed the Surrealist movement

Psychoanalytic 

• Miro derived much of this from the confines of his imagination, showing a vivid depiction of how he and many other Surrealists were as artists themselves.

• They would always create the unexpected in their works as a means to show art in some unrestricted ways through the human figure, objects, and the world itself.

Married to Max Ernst in 1946; met in NY

Influenced by exhibition called Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism at the MoMA in 1936

Meticulous naturalism combined with fantasy—hallucinatory quality

Also questions what is true: “It’s necessary to paint the lie so great that it becomes the truth.”

Metamorphosis common theme

stylistic

• gothic inspiration

Formal

• limited color pallet

  • neutral colors

• balance in distribution of objects

• stark white, contrast of light and dark

Iconographic

• memento- mozi

Social-Historical

• similar to Dutch still lives

• lights and darks similar to that of the Baroque period

Power Reations

• lie vs truth

• strategy vs chaos

Biographical

• max Earnst- person she got involved with, possibly husband

• Exabition in Moma

• librarian for a time

• liked reading

Art-Historical

• inspired by surrealism at Moma

Psychoanalytic

• death and mortality

• anxiety

• where is the line between lie and truth

Ideas of metamorphosis and magical realism

avoids the frequent Surrealist stereotyping of women as objects of male desire. Instead, she drew on her life and friendships to represent women's self-perceptions, the bonds between women of all ages

Also had relationship with Max Ernst and he left his wife; Ernst was arrested several times in German-occupied France and eventually fled to the United States with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, abandoning his relationship with Carrington. Destroyed by her separation from Ernst, Carrington left France and traveled to Madrid, narrowly escaping the Nazis. In Spain she suffered a psychotic breakdown and was hospitalized in a mental hospital in Madrid. When she began suffering from repeated delusions and anxiety attacks, her parents intervened in her medical care. Carrington was institutionalized and treated with shock therapy. The artist was traumatized by this ordeal, and she eventually sought refuge in Lisbon's Mexican embassy.

Wrote about hyena and white horses in short stories; both have magical powers; one character has power to change herself into white horse

Galloping white horse becomes a kind of liberated surrogate self

Stylistic

• loud colors capture attention

• surrealist

Formal

• wild hair on subject

• fairly flat

• smaller hands and feet

Iconographic

• horse= freedom

• wild hair= wild personality she had

• hands mirrors pose of horse

• merging 2 worlds together

Social-Historical

• marry a rich man expectation high society

Power Relations

• societal expectations feel oppressive

Biographical

• married a fellow painter

  • met this painter shortly after this painting

• yearned for freedom

• Hispanic ethnicity (Mexico)

• English culture

• fell in love

Art-Historical

• had to move back to Mexico, husband was sent to a concentration camp

Psychoanalytic

• feelings of pressure when navigating societal expectations

• inner need for freedom

Influences? Thomas Hart Benton, Surrealism, automatism, native American sand painting, Egyptian Art, ancient mythology

Two figures standing like sentinels on either side

Prostrate figure in center

Pollock’s interpretation of Surrealist practice of automatism, automatic mark making intended to tap into subconscious mind

Midwestern subjects

Egg tempera

Rhythm

Good and bad

Influenced by Diego Rivera, Renaissance, El Greco

Influenced Jackson Pollock

Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, where he summered before it was an upscale vacation place

Medium: Oil on Masonite

Grant Wood, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931

Deliberately naïve and folksy, in contrast to the prevailing trends towards modernism and abstraction

Influenced by study of German Neue Sachlickheit (New Objectivity) and Flemish portraits

Bird’s eye view of a New England town on the historic night of April 18, 1775—the start of the Revolutionary War

Paul Revere on horse, riding out to warn the colonists of the approach of the British

Midwestern subjects

Medium: Egg tempera and oil

Rhythm, movement of rolling hills echoed in trees and clouds

Influenced by Diego Rivera, Renaissance, El Greco

Influenced Jackson Pollock

Two figures standing like sentinels on either side

Prostrate figure in center

Pollock’s interpretation of Surrealist practice of automatism, automatic mark making intended to tap into subconscious mind

The most important similarity between these two works is

• The reference to ancient mythology

similarities

• line work uses lots of curves

• bright colors

• reference to ancient mythology

• allover composition

• surrealist practice of "automatism"- automatic mark- making

• reference to the violence and chaos felt in the world as a result of 2 world wars

Medium:oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas

MoMA

By 1947 began to experiment with “allover painting”; then drip paintings

Used sticks, dried brushes, etc

Harold Rosenberg: “action painting”: process of painting was as important as the completed picture

“informed by skills honed by years of practice and reflection, just as jazz musicians improvise after years of regimented training

Allover painting: no part of the composition is given formal precedence over another

Painting becomes an environment that encompasses the spectator

Pollock referred to being “in” his paintings while he worked

Medium: Enamel paint on canvas

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

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

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

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

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

Existentialism reaction to destruction of world wars: no absolute truths

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

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

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

“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.”

"I am nature" is what he used to say

Before embarking on complete abstraction, Pollock once fumed, “. . . That guy missed nothing!” and hurled a book of Picasso’s work across the room.

In response to works by Pollock and his peers, Picasso scoffed: “I’m against that sort of stuff. As far as these new painters are concerned, I think it is a mistake to let oneself go completely and lose oneself in the gesture. Giving oneself up entirely to the action of the painting—there’s something in that which displeases me enormously.”

What messages do you see?

• Work behind modern city life

Medium: Tempera and crayon on board

Stylistic analysis: focus on African heritage, ancient Egyptian influences

Formal analysis: geometric shapes, bright colors, complementary color palet, emphasis in movement, emphasis on shape

Iconography: bondage of African slaves, star- symbolizing North Star, stairs symbolizing old-middle- and new kingdoms, purple- royalty, woman- mother of Egypt

Social-Historical: Embracing black history, made for 100yrs sentential, during times of segregation, symbolizing famous people

Power-relations: discrimination, hope for a better future

Biographical: inspired by published piece "A New Negro"

Art-Historical: African Masks, 2 modern men set example for society

Medium: tempera on hardboard

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

Significance

• The Migration Series is considered a landmark in modern art. 

• It offers a new vision of the contemporary Black experience. 

Medium: Tempera on harboard

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

• The Migration of the Negro series is a 60-panel series that documents the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities. 

• Lawrence originally intended the series to educate children about the history of the migration. 

  
  

Hans Hofmann

Arshile Gorky

Willem de Kooning

Jackson Pollock

Lee Krasner

Franz Kline

Bradley Walker Tomlin

Mark Tobey

Philipe Guston

Elaine de Kooning

Grace Hartigan

oil on canvas

Born in Bavaria; studied in Paris 1903-1914

Taught in Munich and then US: UC Berkeley, then at NY Art Students League

Then at his own Hans Hofmann school of Fine Arts in NY and Massachusetts

One of premier art educators and theoreticians in the US; concentrated on concepts of pictorial structure

Thick, rectangular slabs of paint aligned with picture’s edge

Rectangles of color affirm flatness of the picture; also appear to advance and recede spatially

“push and pull” effect (Hofmann)

Large (6’x8’)

Resembles vast landscape and microscopically detailed internal anatomy

Veiled but recognizable shapes

Biomorphic imagery owed to Kandinsky and Miro, whose works he knew well

Also Surrealist automatism

By means of his unique approach to color and form, Arshile Gorky aimed to communicate both his painful childhood experience of the Armenian Genocide and the close affinity he felt with nature, especially the landscape. In 1920, Gorky fled to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life.

He settled in New York City, where avant-garde artists from both the United States and Europe converged during the 1940s, and his work directly reflects this cultural and historical milieu. In addition, Gorky and many of his contemporaries were fascinated by other cultures—past and present—especially their myths, legends, and spiritual beliefs.

In 1941, Gorky married his second wife Agnes Magruder (American, 1921–2013), whose parents owned a farm in Virginia.

This pastoral setting inspired the creation of “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb,” which reflects both the artist’s physical surroundings as well as his memories of the gardens of his homeland.

The complexities and contradictions Gorky felt were present in his own life are built into the layers of this painting. Its title can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

In the ancient world, the liver symbolized the soul and passion of the artist. “Cock” can refer to a rooster and is also slang for “penis.” However, “cock’s comb” (or “coxcomb”) is simultaneously a term for a flowering plant, a jester’s cap, and a fool. In ancient Greek mythology, a rooster was sacrificed to the well-endowed Priapus, the god of nature and fertility.

Although there are clear allusions to female and male genitalia in the work, overall Gorky’s forms are indefinable.

Medium: Oil and metallic paint on canvas

Worked on many paintings of women

“simultaneously repellent and arresting evocation of woman as sex symbol and fertility goddess” (p. 409)

He said his images had to do with “the female painted through all the ages, all those idols” (could have meant a Greek goddess, a Renaissance nude, a Surrealist femme fatale, or curvaceous American movie star with her big ferocious grin)

similarities

• many layers of paint

• the feeling of chaos

• the "spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art"

• Gesture painting: "process is as important as the completed picture"

Worked on many paintings of women

“simultaneously repellent and arresting evocation of woman as sex symbol and fertility goddess” (p. 409)

He said his images had to do with “the female painted through all the ages, all those idols” (could have meant a Greek goddess, a Renaissance nude, a Surrealist femme fatale, or curvaceous American movie star with her big ferocious grin)

Started as Cubist—studied with Hans Hofmann in NY

Met Jackson Pollock in group art show; married in 1945

Concerned with spontaneous gesture and large-scale allover compositions but with grid structure

Looks like writing; viewer anticipates decoding the marks but they remain a mystery

Medium: Oil, paper and canvas collage on canvas

1955 cut up discarded canvases she and Pollock had painted; assembled sliced images into new compositions

Collaborative; collage (like collaboration of Picasso and Braque, who also introduced collage to their practice jointly)

Medium: oil, paper collage, and canvas

Later works eliminate curved forms;

Straight, girder-like strokes across full breadth of 8 ½’ canvas

Used house-painter brushes on unstretched canvases tacked to his studio wall

Rugged but controlled brushstrokes into powerful, architectural structures

Affinity with industrial objects—trains, cranes, bridges

Insistence on the equivalence of the whites (not just background)

Also painted the white areas, sometimes on top of the black

Medium: Tempera on paper board

Moved from NY to Seattle in 1922

Religious: convert of the Bahai faith—stressed ”the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind.”

Studied Chinese brush painting in 1923; Zen Buddhism in China and Japan in the 1930’s