The Stonebreakers
1849

Realism = Real Life

•French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire argued that the arts should reflect the here-and-now

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

•Championed laborers and common people

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Prosperpine

1874

denounced most painting since Raphael; liked art they perceived as simple, direct, and sincere: Fra Angelico, Jan van Eyck; also spirituality of late Gothic period

Secret society started by 3 students at the London Royal Academy: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

1.Wanted to reform ills of the Industrial Revolution through spirituality and art

2.Looked to Early Renaissance and Gothic art (art before Raphael) as pure, genuine art

3.Wanted to depict “truth” by close observation of nature and details

4.Work is characterized by rich, pure color on a white ground; also included symbolism

5.Looked to literature for subject matter, especially Shakespeare, the Bible, and Arthurian legends

Edgar Degas

1874

Interest in capturing:

everyday subjects
on-the-spot outdoor scenes
fleeting moments, impermanence
atmosphere, light, colored shadow
modern urban life, leisure activities
upper middle class/nouveau riche
times of day/year
look of ukiyo-e (Japanese prints)

The Kiss
1907-8

Characteristics:

• Emphasized world of dreams, moods, fears, and desires over everyday, contemporary world

• Dissatisfaction with modernity
  

Fountain

1917

Reaction against World War I

Focused on absurdity, element of chance
(Enlightenment values of logic and reason only lead to war)

Challenged status quo in art, culture, etc.

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

Logic and reason (Enlightenment) only leads to war

La persistencia de la memoria
1931

1930’s
Element of chance (like Dada)
Randomness related to dream states
Juxtaposition of unrelated objects
Exploration of the subconscious mind
Dream images
Stream of consciousness

One: Number 31

1950

Action Painting

Made NYC center of art world for the first time

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

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

Campbell's Soup Cans

1962

Reaction to elitism of Abstract Expressionism

Sought a mass-produced look—accessible

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

• What does “Arcadia” refer to? 
  • It usually refers to person or death who lived in a tomb, but in here, it is understood as a mythic or ideal place
• What period of art are the figures in this painting based on? 
  • It is based on Greek and Roman figures: man is ancient shepherd and women is dressed very classical
• What is the message on the tomb that one of the figures points to? 
  • “I too am a Arcadia’ - the death said that “you will still see the death even in an ideal place.”
• What elements of the painting suggest a passage of time? 
  • The tomb is more ancient than the people because it is more worn down
  • the sun is also setting at the background so it is also saying the passage of time
  • the man on the right of the tomb is looking back to the woman who dressed more classical = sense of longing and looking back to the past

• What is the story behind this painting? 
  • St John is writing the Book of revelation at the end of his life
• What does the eagle in the painting symbolize? 
  • the eagle in the painting symbolize St John
• What is an “ideal landscape?” What are qualities of the “ideal landscape” in this painting? 
  • order of rationalize
  • visual path to your eyes to lead you through the painting, rest and discover
  • not a real place but more of an ideal, imaginary place: perfect composition of the trees
• What elements of the painting suggest a passage of time? 
  • aspects of different times: Roman and Egyptian civilization have ended, but Christianity will keep continue

• What class of people was this painting created for? 
  • Middle and Upper class
• What were the artists trying to portray about the peasant family? 
  • the peasant modest, sober and serious
• What are “classical” characteristics of this painting? 
  • naturalism:lines of drapery and folds
  • very static, not a lot of movements, vertical & horizontal
• What are 3 ways simplicity is emphasized in this work? 
  • the color palette: limited colors used
  • simplicity of interorie and room setting
  • way the characters is arrange; not a lot of dynamic composition

• Name 4-5 ways that the artist shows us that this king has absolute power? 
  • drapery fabric and fur of his gown = very expensive
  • blue and gold embroidery (the flower pattern = the France royalty)
  • elbow out to show confidence
  • sword pointed out
  • it looks like we are looking up on him
  • the hair is a wig; the higher your hair is, the powerful you are
• What did King Louis IV mean when he said, “L’etat, c’est moi”? 
  • I myself am the nation.= be the divine ruler of France
• Which Greek god did Louis IV compare himself to? 
  • Helios, God of the Sun and music
• How did this work serve as a proxy for the king in his absence? 
  • the painting will go to the throne of the King = cannot turn your back to the King

Exposes their ordinariness

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

What are they looking at? Mirror—missing element

Awkwardness; uncomfortable

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

Part of a series of prints (Los Caprichos)

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

Like Blake, Goya becomes visionary;

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full epigraph for caprichio No. 43 is: "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."^[4]

Spain was occupied by Napoleon’s troops; Napoleon put his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on the throne in Madrid; at first the Spaniards supported Napoleon’s ideals and made friends with troops, but after a series of atrocities, they rapidly became disillusioned; national uprising against the French; a firing squad was set up to shoot anyone who appeared in the streets.

Vivid portrayal of brutalities; indictment against French troops

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

Comment on what happens when people lose control of reason

Church in background—why?

Indebted to Baroque: strong contrast in light for impact

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

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

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

Firing squad: faceless, mechanical uniformity

Not heroic; protest against war

Real event, but universal in significance

Christlike figure

Symbols of incomprehensible cruelty; fascination with irrational

Prophecy that one of Saturn’s sons would dethrone him

Jupiter/Zeus escaped and prophecy came true

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

Flesh/meat/bone quality of figures

Sublime terror; ignores what paintings are supposed to be about

Incubus=evil spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

looked to medieval manuscript painting for inspiration

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

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

Haywain=the horse drawn wagon crossing the ford (in Constable’s native Suffolk)

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

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

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

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

Attention to intangibles: light, weather, atmosphere

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

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

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

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

Also interested in atmosphere, light but more expressive

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

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

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

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

Helped to inspire French Impressionists

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

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

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

What is the mood? Silent, bleak; somber sky at twilight, cold (winter); everything dead or dying

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

Any hope? the rising sun, the tree will grow again, New Moon: symbol of waxing/waning/rebirth? Morning will come, spring will come, Resurrection (crosses)(symbol of Christ) = the monk can come back because of God = death is not permanent

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

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

Landscape is a metaphor for transience of life, human achievement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human presence? (Cole by parasol)

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

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

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

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

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

Sharp lines, stark composition Neoclasical; exoticism Romantic

Golden scepter on the left of Charlemagne; ivory hand of justice of French medieval kings on the right; certify royal legacy

Ingres studied in Rome and sent back pictures for exhibition; not well received

This painting exhibited in Paris Salon 1804, highly acclaimed (23 feet wide)

Story: Napoleon visits his troops in sick house where bubonic plague has broken out; touches open wound; meant to show bravery, humanitarianism

Truth: Napoleon poisoned these same sick troops when he left Jaffa

Influences: dramatic light of Caravaggio; damned man by Michelangelo (last Judgment); muscular nudes of Michelangelo; framing arches like David (his teacher)

Romanticism? Exotic: Islamic architecture, attendants with costumes: this painting helped launch popularity of exotic subjects—like National Geographic; also horror of death

also contemporary event: Greeks revolution against ruling Turks; Turks raided Greek island of Chios and massacred or enslaved the whole population (20,000): Europeans supported Greek independence, passion for democracy and individual freedom; also sympathized because they were Christians vs Muslims

Foreground: group rounded up for slavery or execution (also rape); hopelessness, doom, suffering; no individual heroes, but treats Greeks collectively as martyrs; villains (unfeeling soldiers at apex of pyramids): Dead and dying reminiscent of Raft of Medusa;

When he saw Constable’s Haywain at the same Salon, he repainted sky at the last minute

Critics felt it was not a subject for painting, but he became known as the great “Romantic painter” (Gericault died this year) (before Romanticism had only been applied to music (Berlioz) and writing (Victor Hugo)

It is a imaginary/mythlogical women as a symbol of liberty = stand for an idea (Roman Style of Profile)

Everyone in every classes are fighting together against the unfair ruler

Indifference vs. passion of women, animals; no hero! Main character is opposite of hero

Used Baroque lighting (like Goya) to heighten emotional impact; lots of “s” shapes—writhing, snakelike; skin tones have greens, blues—emotional use of color, loose

Romantic: Turbulent, sensual, passionate involvement, color vs. line, spontaneous movement, chaotic composition vs. cool, detached, formal neoclassicism; no redeeming moral, just fascinating horror

Moment when a distant ship is sighted; despair, death and dying lead to hope, survival; man vs. nature (Romantic: wide range of emotions, force of nature, horror, suffering)

No single hero, explores man’s inhumanity to man--inhumanity of captain towards them; also inhumanity to each other (cannibalism); tendency of romanticism to ask questions

Diagonal composition, Baroque jutting into our space, Caravaggio light and dark;

G did studies of reconstructed raft, dead bodies at the morgue, limbs, drowned bodies; tried to capture details—realistic?; Still carefully planned, organized; bodies still muscular (classical), not gaunt;

In style of a history painting; elevating contemporary subjects (not classical, Biblical subject)

Combines classical dignity with taste for exotic architecture, clothing, fabrics, tiles; visited harem (had to receive special permission) mood? Luxury, sensuousness

Palette more colorful; dappled light, color; no Neoclassical planarity and line

Shadows are colored, not black (breakthrough in painting but like Vermeer)

Edo was the name for Tokyo; residence of the emperor

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

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

Linear details on face; almost no shading

3D forms? Created by contours, overlapping, foreshortening

One of the most famous works of art in the world

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

From the series 36 views of Mt. Fuji

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

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

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

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

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

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

Birds’ eye view

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

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

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

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

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

Look for unity in the composition:

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

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

flat shapes
sharp contours
compressed space
cropping
angles
assymetry

1853 Commodore Perry opened up Japan to the west: fascination with Japanese—Madame Butterfly by Puccini, etc.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Realism=real life

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

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

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

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

Not even a story, like Raft of Medusa

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

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

Technical finesse: scientific detail of farm animals, specific species

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

Looks photographic—very detailed, close brushwork

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

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

Sculling pictures: heroes of modern life

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

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

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

Why scandalous?

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

But acknowledged that it was inspired by Titian, Raphael

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

References to Titian, Raphael

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

Upper left: woman on a trapeze

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

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

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

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

Unglamourous poses

Cropped figures suggest candid viewpoint

Tipped up floors and assymetry of Japanese prints

Potential instability is anchored by verticals

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

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

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

Focused more on landscapes and cityscapes than figures

Worked outdoors completely to record light, atmosphere

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

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

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

Showing that the train station is a place to gather different working classes = city life

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

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

Flickering, transitory light

focus on people, lack of atmosphere and landscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

Painted outdoors like Monet

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

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

Bathing regularly was a new phenomenon

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

High viewpoint like Japanese prints; also strong forms and contours

loose brushstroke in the background

tighter brushstroke for the woman in the front

message: gender equality and identity -> same level, no one is overpowering than other, she has her own gaze

Japanese woodblock print inspired

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

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

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

use colors to paint shadow (not black anymore) -> light vibe

Victorian morals;

Inspired by a passage in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield

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

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

Cluttered with objects of consumerism, also cluttered with details

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

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

Biblical passages on bottom

PRB best known for Biblical scenes and scenes from literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From nature, considered spiritual

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

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

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

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

He does not care about the subject matter, but more on harmony and color (subtle form)

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Had a powerful influence on Picasso and Matisse

Felt art should be based on a scientific system

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

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

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

6x10 feet—like monumental history painting

Did detailed studies—like a stage set: made monumental

Brushstoke: broken, but systematic, impersonal

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

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

Japanese Print Influence: angle cropping, perspective

Greenish makeup = night performer

Naturalistic

First Electric light invented at that time

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

Influence of Degas: above and subject matter

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

Makes very 2-D

Moulin Rouge--Cabaret

Dancer: Louise Weber, credited with creating the cancan

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

Satirical: Appealing? Illusion of gaiety, but emptiness:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psychological isolation

Mood?

Emotional intensity

Surging, rhythmic lines

Everything in the landscape is echoed in the town:

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

Lit houses in rural village protected by surrounding hills

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

Expressive: not realist or Impressionist

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

Committed suicide 1 year later

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diagonal of apple tree like Japanese prints

Perspective of Degas

Hats, bonnet strings look animated

Influenced a lot of other painters

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

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

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

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

Hard edges of Ingres, looks simplistic, charming, direct

Also seeking simplicity of pre-civilization

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

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

Explored psychology, subconscious

About deep, inner anxiety; universal anxiety of modern man

Skull-like head, compressed, writhing

Landscape is oozing, unstable

Violent perspective

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

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

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

Stone statues probably carved to embody the divine power of deceased rulers and commemorate important ancestors and were made from around 1000-1650 AD

Created about 887 of them

Backs to the sea to watch over village

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

The Asmat honored their dead with feasts and rituals, which both commemorated the deceased and reminded the living to avenge their deaths. The towering Asmat "bis" poles were made for these funeral feasts. The basic form of the bis is an openwork pole incorporating several ancestor figures and a winglike projection that represents the pole's phallus.

In Asmat belief, no death was accidental. Each death was always caused by an enemy, either through headhunting raids or sorcery. Death created an imbalance in society, which the living had to correct by taking an enemy head. When a village had suffered a number of deaths, it would hold a bis ceremony, which consisted of a series of feasts held over several months. A number of bis poles were carved for the ceremony and displayed in front of the men's house, where they formed the center of a mock battle between men and women. The poles were kept until a successful headhunt had been carried out and the balance restored. After a final feast, the Asmat abandoned the bis poles in the sago palm groves from which they obtained their primary food. As the poles decayed, their fertile supernatural power seeped into the earth and fertilized the sago trees.

 On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 354

Object Details

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

Passion beautiful, dangerous (abyss)

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

Son of a preacher; religious imagery

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

Material world dissolved, ethereal

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

Soft, hazy, indistinct

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

Life, death, eternity; uncertainty, troubling

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

Emotionally charged: confront death with fear, resignation, anguish

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

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

reference from nature

start from Czech Republic

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

Destroyed architectural box; undulating façade, irregularly shaped interior spaces

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

no straight line; very organic form and shapes

Point of No Return

Characteristic:

rapid change
individualism
exploration
new inventions
challenging assumptions of the past

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

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

Resembles head with mouth open; first cry

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

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

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

We don’t see a bird; Spirit of flight

Placed on a reliquary chest as a guardian figure

Symbolizes connection with ancestors and desire for continuation (children)

timelessness

Formal elements? Geometric shapes, flat

Headdress

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

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

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

Baskets sealed and preserved in sacred shrine huts

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

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

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

Elegant play of positive and negative space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forms unreadable

Perspective skewed

No shadow or doesn’t make sense

Color--not representative

Space—impossible to read

Notions of feminine beauty

Influences?

Manet—women look straight at us, confront viewer

Cezanne-planes, different points of view

Matisse-color

African and Iberian masks

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

How did this lead to Cubism?

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

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

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

Woodgrain was painted by Picasso and cut out

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

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

Instead of breaking down images, now building up

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

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

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

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

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

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

about prostitute

Nationalistic mood; used by German artists during early Renaissance

Like Whistler

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

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

Simple, direct, spiritual

Grid of Cubism

Colors like Matisse, Kandinsky

Directness and naivete of children’s and folk art

Luminescent colors of stained glass windows

Sense of spirituality

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

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

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

Understated; strips everything inessential

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

Optimism of modernity: machines, motion, etc.

Influenced by Cubism, Futurism

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

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

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

Challenges notion that art requires technical skill and craftsmanship

Interpretations? Pedastol with bust?

symbolism?: circles=cycles of life

Blooming bush=birth

Farmer with scythe=death

Tree of life

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

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

Classical buildings, figurative=allegiance to classical past

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

Movement started in Zurich (center for war protests)

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

Sought to capture abstract universal forces (like Kandinsky)

“DADA” applied in retrospect; similar goals

“Readymade”; entered in 1917 independent art show

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

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

Defies conventional notions of beauty

HUMOR

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.”

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

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

Antiwar Kathe Kollwitz at center, antidada at sides

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

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

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

Reminds me of Liberty Leading the People (new cause)

Wiry line, childlike drawing of Paul Klee

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

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

(how many ways can we not show depth?)

Claims superiority of unconscious mind over conscious mind

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

Time? Rational, measured

Death, deterioration

Everything is irrational—attack on the rational

Viewers’ own unconscious

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

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

Gift for composer Erik Satie

Tacks glued onto flat side of an iron

Suggests pain, violence, uselessness?

Juxtaposition two desirable things; becomes disturbing

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

Organic shapes like Miro and Arp; suggest natural forms

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

Simple colors: primary, secondary, black and white

Childlike, joyous

Flat space and depth combined

Also non-western art, including Pre-Columbian art

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

Interested in portraying elemental and universal

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

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

Interplay between solid and void; suggests womb or tide pools

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

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

Mondrian based art on this theory; called it Neo Plasticism

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

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

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

Cubist influence; also stained glass

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

Critics felt it had sexual references

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

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

Window into Midwest world where Wood grew up and lived

What can you tell about these people?

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

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

Neat and clean: crisp drawing, verticals and horizontals

Industrious: pitchfork, plants on porch

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

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

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

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

About movement and change

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

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

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

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

Why black and white? Thought color would distract

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

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

Bird=dove of peace (annihilated)

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

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

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

Like synthetic Cubism

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

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

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

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

Focus on human emotion connection, evokes a sense of emotions

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)

Began using reserves of metal he had on hand, unplanned

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

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

Burnished the steel to give it a textured, painterly surface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chose everyday, familiar forms

Takes readymades(flags) and paints over them

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

Wax-based encaustic; painterly

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

Predecessor to Pop Art

Revealed manipulative impact of mass media

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

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

Known for seeing beauty in low art

Blurs distinctions between fine art and mass culture

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

Reveals cultural stereotypes of men and women at the time

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

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

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

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

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

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

hand painting the mass production products

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

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

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

Left side fixed, right side has movement?

Figure/ground relationships change?

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

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

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

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

  working with farmers to get their permission to use their land

  getting local people to help with the construction

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Interested in Rauschenberg, Nevelson using objects from everyday life

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

Not permanent

Walk through it, experience

No meaning attached; left to viewer

Performance Art, Happenings

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

Like a combine in time and space

Reminds me of switching channels on tv or radio

Lots of performance art followed

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

Finding beauty in everyday ordinariness?

How different from theater? Takes place in an art context

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

No push-pull of space

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

(so why title?)

Geometrical precision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the meaning of modern existence? Like Edward Hopper

“brazenly representational”: no attempt to accommodate art establisment

Also dedicated to Aftrican-American heritage

Like Louise Nevelson but personal objects, meaningful, intimate

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

Small!

Focuses on women and important role of women

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

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

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

Extensive research

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

919 other women’s names inscribed in tiles

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

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

Video art

Monitors behind each state with different imagery

Prevalence of tv in America, rapidly changing

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