Art History 11

Mengs, Parnassus, (1760)

-sketch for fresco in Rome

-overcoming Baroque and going toward Neoclassicim

-influence by Raphael, in the center is sun God Apollo

Kauffman, Cornelia Pointing to her Children as Treasures, (1785)

-Neoclassicim

-dissing the lady, saying she is not materialistic

-very lit, nothing hidden

-she started British Royal Academy

Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, (1770)

-modern history painting

-grand manner = new genre between history and portrait

-dressed in modern costume

-figures still noble

Fuseli, The Nightmare, (1781)

-Romanticism, emotion of fear, engaging imagination

-not popular with critics of time

-supernatural, woman is dreaming of demons/shadowy

Francisco Goya, Third of May 1808 (1815)

-Spain, he studied under neoclassicist

-worked for king but supported revolution

-painting of historical event

-bloody fighting, execution

-terror + fear, empathize w/ figure in white

-faceless, off balance composition

Gros, Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa (1805)

-depiction of conquest into Africa

-travelled with Napoleon on conquests

-Colonial politics

Gericault, The Raft of the "Medusa" (1820)

-shadows

-political statement about monarchy/nobility

-eye drawn diagonally, left bottom to top right

-romantic = subject matter not style

-green/yellow tint to bodies

Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People: July 28 1830 (1830)

-obsessed with genius + emotion

-hopeful image = overthrowing

-monumentalized uprising = modern history painting

-allegorical figure (freedom) = triangle shape

Ingres, Large Odalisque, (1814)

-overlying themes of orientalism

-idealization of figure; erotically charged

-during Napoleon's monarchy, North Africa

-blue & white; extravagant; wealthy

-very linear, clarity

Gerome, The Snake Charmer, (1870)

-director of Academy of Arts

-Far east = orientalism (focused on Egypt)

-painting about disclosure and concealment

-painting about a performer (so about the audience)

-walls intricately designed but the floor is dirty/cracked

Daguerre, The Artist's Studio, (1840)

-very interested in photography

-"Daguerreotype" photograph on highly finished plate; highly detailed

-couldn't be easily reproduced, spread across world from France

Joseph Turner, Slaves Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying; "The Slave Ship" (1840)

-emphasis on weather/hectic

-sublime/disorganization of painting

-force of nature, atmospheric effect

-romantic seascape about a political event =abolition of salve trade (depth/depravity)

James Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket, (1875)

-aesthetic, construction of reality

-abstract qualities of art w/ music

-restricted in tones = greens and yellows

-night scene depicting fireworks

-started traditional one row (eye level) hanging of paintings

Honore Daumier, Rue Transnonain, (1830)

-almost a caricature of results of massacre by French Revolution

-lithograph

-dead family

-created during freedom of the press

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, (1849)

-"statement of principle"

-dark colors of green and grey, give weight to figures

-used canvas of dimensions (usually for history paintings) to present an ordinary subject (no idealization)

Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, (1860)

-incarnate rural working class

-picking up individual ears of corn while huge harvest is in background

-slanting light of setting sun = sculptural look

-thankless task

Manet, Olympia (1863)

-modeled after Venus of Orbino

-paints realistic woman, not historical or mythological

-challenges function of art in France

-stiff, her gaze is intimidating

Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, (1880)

-representation of modernity (early modernism in flatness)

-emerging because of industrial revolution

-social conditions of everyday life

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson (1890)

-race is another group forgotten in traditional work

-serious side of something that has been caricatured

-loving, elderly man teaching young boy

-poverty fades, dignity and pride focused

-European modernism

Claude Monet, Impression: Sunrise (1870)

-beginning of impressionism (very controversial)

-fast, open brushstrokes. Unfinished look

-independent from academy + salon

-momentary impressions of nature

Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child, (1890)

-weight of limbs have natural quality

-wrapped in each other = circle

dress dissolves into strokes of paint

-homage to motherhood

-woman as subject instead of object

-connection between woman and vessel

Edgar Degas, The Rehearsal on Stage (1875)

-paints in studio, ballet dancers are "urban workers"

-closer to academic standards, pastels over brush and ink drawing

-dancers have tedious lives, men pay to watch

-looking through a theater box, fragments of instruments in foreground

Good Narrative Painting:

1. derived from nature

2. has divine power

3. serves purpose to artist and audience

Skill and talent of artist rather than the worth of the painting (Humanist values)

-definite improvement between ancient and modern art

-art has made progress because of master and apprentice

-ancient contributed proportion, rule, order, and manner; modern makes art 'come alive'

-Italy is birthplace of the Renaissance and discussion of art history

-artists views are biased because Italy has defined tradition of Western art

-ideas: painting is art's ideal form and should be hung in rectangles on wall

-Dutch: description of natural world, more women artists

-art history is all perception

-response to Bellori on Caravaggio

-Bellori compliments use of shadow and color to create realistic figures

-his work was simple and basic, disrespectful to religious work (from older artists)

-Olson doesn't like that eyes are drawn to small details (like tattered cloth)

-primary source

-believes in simplicity and organization of the mind

-painting is one of the most intimate forms of communication

-believes only a select few have talent

-artistic genius = one who is able to be committed and inspired w/o having wandering/impressionable mind

-modernism = ability to capture eternal beauty in "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent"

-every artist has a sense of modernity

-takes something fleeting and makes it eternal

-genius = main quality is curiosity, "man of the world"

-nature is ultimate source of knowledge

-artist by himself is not genius

-issue with 1984 MOMA exhibition 'Primitivism'

-no common theme between work

-doesn't use primitivism in modern age, digs up archaeological runs and calls it primitivism

-primitivism = western art with non-western influence

-primitivism was invented to allow audience to absorb ideas/culture of non-westerners and celebrate art

-art critic: very broad definitions

-abstract expressionism: doesn't represent object or purpose, solely painter expressing themselves w/o ties to aesthetics (no purpose, style, form b/c it is solely the artist's world)

-wants to free itself from some sort of constraint

-Wants to free itself from purpose and style

-Minimalism: style defined by geometric shapes and objects

-leftist; art doesn't hold meaning

-reflected violent and disagreeable political period

-power came from monetary value and meaning it held to the artist

-many different definitions

-result of the fall of modernism in the late 1980s

-movement away from rebuilding of humanity, lack of belief in progress and modernization, realization that its not the avant-garde

-decline of the West as the center of the power

-other cultures/minorities are better represented

Watteau, The Signboard of Gersaint (1720)

-lots of pastel/interest in color

-interior of art dealer's shop

-glowing satins/silks

momento mori = reminder of mortality

-fame might be subject to ravages of time

Fragonard, The Swing, (1766)

-Rococo: era of radical change

-age of Enlightnment (England + France)

-young girl being pushed by elder bishop (in the shadows) her lover is swooning below her

-anticipation, desire, playful, frothy pinkness

Smibert, Dean Berkeley and His Entourage, (1730)

-Baroque style

-1st artist in America to make living as painter

-painting to commemorate school of Bermuda

Smibert is holding rolled piece of paper (professionalization of art?)

-Berkeley looking upwards, thinking about heaven?

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, (1778)

-large scale history painting

-climatic rescue of boy from shark

-faces of emotion

-American artist

-idea of salvation

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, (1780)

-"public" painting

-most important French neoclassicism painter

-severely plain

-based on historical texts (commissioned by Louis XVI

-separating men and women in architectural space

Girodet-Trioson, Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, (1800)

-French artist

-first man of African descent to hold

-lines, public, civic, clarity, realistic

-French philosopher in background

Guillon Lethiere, Oath of the Ancestors, (1820)

-"symbol of liberty of Haitian people"

-celebrates union of black slaves against Napoleon's army

-complicated relationship between emancipated people

-damaged in earthquake

George Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1885)

-combine impressionism with traditional relief sculpture

-"pointalism" or "neoimpressionsim"

-composition that merges in viewer's eye (very large work)

-abstraction/new rules of color

-important social dimensions = French day-off

Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (Spirit of Dead Watching), (1890)

-friend of Van Gogh

-leaves wife and children to do/study art

-painted in Tahiti

-combination of abstraction and emotion

-primitivism: borrowing non-western forms by western artists

Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, (1890)

-six distinguished citizens of France

-each occupied by own person conflict

-monument to Hundred Years' War

-sculptures

Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, (1885)

-highly structured paintings

-ordered nature, 100 drawings/30 paintings of same mountain

-branch in foreground creates depth

-branch traces outline of mountain range

-alternation between depth and flatness

-highly structured and stable

Henry Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), (1905)

-nude paintings

-bright colors

-thick lines/shapes

-fauvism = interested in color

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (1910)

-forceful, angular planes

-form and content equalized

-women are prostitutes

-lack of depth

-a lot of African inspiration

-enormous, almond-shaped eyes

Braque, Violin and Palette, (1910)

-simplified faceted forms, flattened spatial planes, and muted colors

-Cubism

-objects are recognizable but fractioned

-significance in musical instrument

Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, (1913)

-Futurism: violent, war, muscular, advanced

-blur between form and immediate environment

-fast pace modern world

-marching into the wind

Duchamp, Fountain, (1917)

-urinal lying on its back; iconic

-'readymade' = ordinary manufactured object designated by artist as work of art

-art should be about the artist's idea

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, (1920)

-purposefully angry critique

-includes dada and anti-dada (nothing is her own)

-signature is picture of head + map showing countries where women are allowed to vote

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1930)

-wanted to cultivate paranoids' vision of the world

-very small piece of work, dreamlike

-meant for individual viewer

-banks of Mediterannean, warm light in background

-discredits our experience of reality

-hidden portrait

-Surrealism

Oppenheim, Object (Luncheon in Fur), (1936)

-revolt against logic/reason

-surrealism = offshoot of dada

-Freudian psychoanalysis

-human mind as battleground

-methods for freeing the unconscious

Joan Miro, Composition, (1933)

-biomorphic

-not arranged by logic, arranged by chance

-doodles

-wanted to assassinate paintings, didn't even like cubism

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), (1950)

-drinking problems, insane asylum

-moves from representation to abstraction

-says he can control the flow of paint

-painted with canvas on the ground, stood over it

Willem de Kooning, Woman I, (1950)

-Abstract Expressionist

-grotesque representation; powerful colors

-wide range of ways to apply paint to canvas

-she appears flattened out

-figure is outlined in black paint

-"the idol, the Venus, the nude"

-reverence vs. fear of feminism

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, (1950)

-Abstract expressionist

-"soak stain" = paint stained rather than coated the canvas

-textured surface and pale color; breakthrough

-shifting planes of color washes

David Smith, Cubi, (1963)

-28 stainless steel sculptures

-welder-sculptor

-influenced by Surrealism and Constructivism

-highly reflective surface, polished

Jasper Johns, Targer with Plaster Casts, (1955)

-parallel between severed body parts and targets

-possibility of reconstruction? body parts lose meaning

-see targets as lack of meaning held by the body of a gay man

-primary colors, based on dada

-artistic value on interpretation of viewers

Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, (1959)

-painting, collage, and found objects

-defiant to Abstract Expressionism

-bald eagle

-"Combines"

-controversial

Allan Kaprow, Yard, (1960)

-bunch of tires in no specific layout

-interactive = audience walks over tires

-expanded sculpture's possibilities

-new physical sensorium

-New York City

Carolee Schneeman, Meat Joy, (1964)

-feminist

-assumption that great art can only be made by men

-nude: female and male

-Body Art (performance art)

-Rubbed raw meat and wet paint onto bodies

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, (1962)

-pop art, half color half B&W

-thinks of himself as a machine

-industrial fabrication

Claes Oldenburg, Store, (1961)

-modeled after a real store but everything was made of plaster

-he studied other stores and cafes for inspiration

-relationship between fiction and fact

-trade money for art

-store was open in NYC

Harmony Hammond, Floorpiece VI, (1973)

-color, made of cloth, spiral

-craft art or fine art? (fine art)

-paint over rug with acryclic paint, emphasizing color of cloth, put on hard surface

Carl Andre, Steel-Magnesium Plain, (1970)

-on the ground

-not colorful, squares, cold, unwelcoming

-Minimalism

-tiles can be taken apart, not connected

-uses space to create 'sculpture'

Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, (1965)

-photo panel, physical chair, text panel

-wasn't interested in artistic beauty

-trying to communicate through minimalism

-one chair or three chairs? how do we define?

-possibility of meaning

Bruce Naumann, Self Portrait as a Fountain, (1970)

-communicate problem of communication

-likening himself to Duchamp's urinal

-not funny/very serious

-revolt against pop art

Eva Hesse, Rope Piece, (1970)

-process art

-rope with latex over it

-dimensions change every time it's installed

-embedded with personal meaning

-fragile, sensuous, delicate

-irrationality

Ana Mendieta, Untitled, From the Tree of Life Series (1977)

-US takes 14,000 Cuban children to America

-permanent sense of dislocation

-ritual actions to connect to Earth

-woman in nature, very un-industrial

-created in Iowa

Beyte Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, (1972)

-part of black power movement

-appropriation = using objects from the world

-militant humor

-black nurse, white baby

-clenched black fist in very center

-mirrors on side of box

-making space for multiculturalism

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, (1970)

-Earth art/site specific

-manipulates raw materials

-can be temporary or permanent/very large

-extends into Great Salt Lake

-meant to remind people of ancient civilizations

-no maintenance, governed by natural elements

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Fil Still, #21 (1980)

-photography used for postmodernism

-very posted, not candid

-image is more important, not picture from the movie

-2nd wave feminism

-taking the picture of herself

-identity is chosen rather than imposed

-different identities for different audiences

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of my Face), (1981)

-critiques the forces that try to make women objects

-female statue = symbol of beauty

-violated by men's gaze

James Luna, The Artifact Piece, (1990)

-Native-American identity

-using stereotypes to refer to himself; physically objectifying himself

-ethnographic object

-identity isn't open to everyone; social constraints

Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, (1996)

-very controversial, bigger than life

-black African virgin?

-parts made from elephant dung

-cut out pictures of women's butts and put on art

-art and culture of Zimbabwe

-reference to Renaissance paintings

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Loverboy), (1990)

-stack of pale blue paper, audience can remove a piece of paper

-encouraged to interact

-abstract reference to his lover who is wasting away from AIDs

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental US, (1995)

-enormous scale of the US

-fluorescent/neon lights

-represents enticement of motels and restaurants

-cultural boundaries between states

-flashing images = "seen from a passing car"

Yinka Shonibare, How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies), (2006)

-race is unknown

-wearing traditional English dress but in African print

-pointing 19th century guns at each other

-black artist, paralyzed since his 20s

-ambiguity in art

Sarah Sze, Triple Point, (2013)

-Venice Biennial

-NY based Chinese American sculptor

-art is inside + outside

-engages with the history of the site

-art as a compass = finding yourself

-forced viewers to come through side door

-created fake boulders

-displays tickets and used coffee cups

-scientific overtone