Art Flashcards
Wassily Kadinsky
1910s | Russia / Germany Bauhaus, Expressionism, Suprematism
“The content of painting is painting. Nothing has to be deciphered.”
- Kandinsky believed abstraction as the manifestation of the spiritual awakening, and color as a direct influence upon the soul.
- Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality. Forgone subject matters and into abstract elements.
- He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered with this process.
Piet mondrian
1920s | Netherlands, De Stijil, Neo-Plasticism
“It is the task of art to express a clear vision of reality.”
- Mondrian’s saw as the spiritual order underlying the visible world, creating a clear, universal aesthetic language within his canvases
- Mondrian reduced his shapes to lines and rectangles and his palette to fundamental basics pushing past references to the outside world toward pure abstraction
- Started Neo-Plasticsim, Mondrian believed that his vision of modern art would transcend divisions in culture and become a new common language based in the pure primary colors, flatness of forms, and dynamic tension in his canvases.
Constantin Brancusi
1920s | Romania / France, Modernism
“One arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself.”
- Born as a peasant family, hated academic technique/school and loved the simplified forms to approach real sense of things.
- Exemplify ideal and archetypal representation through deceptively simple, with their reduced forms aiming to reveal hidden truths, asserting that they disclosed a fundamental, often concealed, reality.
Henri Matisse
1910s | France. Expressionism
“What I dream of is an art of balance, purity and serenity.”
- Close friends with Picasso, started as a law clerk and became close to painting through mother.
- Breaking away from Neo-Impressionism, Matisse used color, dashes, and lines freed from descriptive function into Fauvism (fragmented explosive)
- Matisse used pure colors and the white of exposed canvas to create a light-filled atmosphere “of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter,”
Kazimir Malevich
1920s | Ukraine/Russia, Suprematism
“The square is a living royal infant.”
- Rejected academic art, proposed Suprematism, a pure creation in art. Consisted of geometric shapes in pure color that expresses his ideas about forms and meaning in art would eventually constitute the theoretical underpinnings of non-objective, or abstract, art.
- art should transcend subject matter – the truth of shape and color should reign ‘supreme’ over the image or narrative; composed of flat, abstract areas of paint
- Criticized as a bourgeois artist and supressed.
Paul Klee
1920s | Switzerland. Expressionism / Bauhaus
“One eye sees. the other feels.”
- A Transcendentalism. Believed that the material world was only one among many realities open to human awareness. Employ art as a window onto that philosophical principle.
- Combined his passion for music into poetic art. Klee challenged traditional boundaries separating writing and visual art by exploring a new expressive, and largely abstract or poetic language of pictorial symbols and signs.
Franz Marc
1910s | Germany. Expressionsim
“We look for and paint the inner, spiritual sie of nature.”
- He painted animals because they seemed purer and more beautiful than people. brightly colored animals, especially horses, which he used to convey profound messages about humanity, the natural world, and the fate of mankind.
- Attempted to capture the spiritual through color principles and animal consciousness. Looked to the natural world as an antidote to modern life
- Developed a specific theory of color symbolism. His analysis of color associated blue with the masculine, yellow with the feminine, and red with the physical - often violent - world.
Fernand Leger
1920s in France. Cubism
“I invent images from machines.”
- Léger’s unique brand of Cubism was also distinguished by his focus on cylindrical form and his use of robot-like human figures that expressed harmony between humans and machines, the look of machinery and but devoided of working-class men’s expressions.
- Influenced by the chaos of urban spaces and his interest in brilliant, primary color, Léger sought to express the noise, dynamism, and speed of new technology and machinery
Pablo Picasso
1920s | Spain, Cubism, Surrealism
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
- Classical training and young talent in Madrid, deconstructed the conventions of perspective. Abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world, and began to conceive of it merely as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects.
- The blue period came about his sympathetic depictions of poor people.
- Influenced by Matisse and African art, pained nudes.
- Close friend of Braque’s.
Georges Braque
1920s | France, Cubism.
“Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.”
- Adopted Fauvist style and then influenced by Cezanne and Picasso to make cubism.
- Braque stated that unlike Picasso, his work was “devoid of iconological commentary,” and was concerned purely with pictorial space and composition.
- He wanted to create a tactile perspective that awakens the touch, he used real materials to commune visual and tactile.
- Braque stenciled letters onto paintings, blended pigments with sand, and copied wood grain and marble to achieve great levels of dimension in his paintings.
Umberto Boccioni
1910s | Italian, Futurism, Cubism
“I shall leave this existence with a contempt for all that is not art.”
- Intended to capture the sensations of change and speed on canvas using divisionist color for maximum luminosity.
- Believed that sculpture should capture their prolongation into space. The Futurists’ celebration of the machine and the violent destructive force of modernity.
Edward Hopper
1940s | American Realism
“I would like my work to communicate, but if it doesn’t that’s alright too.”
- Studied illustration and architecture and was amazed by Europe.
- He painted isolated frame houses, genre painting, and loneliness, and depicted isolated and disconnected from their environments.
- He provides a minimum of action, stripping away almost any sign of life or mobility,
- His imagery of figures within urban settings goes well beyond their role as modern cityscapes, exposing the underbelly of the human experience.
Max Beckmann
1930s | Germany, Expressionism.
“I hardly need to abstract things for each object is unreal enough already.”
- Due to WWI, he forged angular, harshly modeled figures in compressed and claustrophobic spaces due the war.
- New Objectivity, which rejected expressionism, and in favour of a cool, factual look at social realities in the WWI.
- He firmly opposed the turn toward abstract art and maintained his desire to “get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting
Marcel Duchamp
1920s | France, Dadaism
“I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.”
- Father of conceptual art, intellectual, concept-driven approaches to art-making
- Duchamp’s lifelong resistance was ‘retinal’ paintings, that appealed primarily to the eye.
- He created readymades, that was meant to carry the mind of the spectator to the verbal.
- The term “readymade” came to designate mass-produced everyday objects taken out of their usual context and promoted to the status of artworks by the mere choice of the artist
Marc Chagall
“I have always tried to remain within the general tradition of a kind of folk art.”
- Active around 1920s, Belarus / France, Expressionism.
- Chagall belonged to the generation that began to leave this world behind, assimilating into Europe and Russia and Jewish culture.
- He recombined motifs from the traditional Jewish world and the villages of Russia. Created a fantasy world.
Giorgio de Chirico
1920s | Greece / Italy, Metaphysical Art.
“One must picture everything in the world as an enigma.”
- Intended to capture strange solitary things, influenced by Nietzsche. He intended to capture the distance and metaphysical nature of objects.
- Influenced surrealists, a pioneer in the revival of classicalism
Giorgio Morandi
“I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see.’
- Active around 1940s in Italy, Metaphysical Art.
- Morandi’s objects are intended to communicate tranquillity. A group of objects that barely provide the indication of a setting.
Otto Dix
“Artists shouldn’t try to improve or convert. They should only bear witness.”
- Active around 1930s, Germany, New Objectivity.
- Experienced horrors of WWI and attempt to capture those horrors. Turned towards cooler and more factual style. He captured war and decadent society of the Weimar Republic.
Joan Miro
“For me, a form is never something abstract; it is always a sign of something.”
- Active around 1940s in Spain, Surrealism
- Developed his own personal language of signs and symbols by exploring different ways of generating paintings.
- For him, non representational art was a deserted house. Wanted to capture the soul.
George Grosz
“This world is ugly, sick and mendacious.”
- Active around 1930s, Germany, New Objectivity
- Grosz’s satirical drawings caused him to be prosecuted for obscenity, blasphemy, and insulting the army. He was disgusted by Germany.
- Particiapted in Dadaist and Communist parties.
Alexander Calder
“I want to make things that are fun to look at, that have no propaganda value whatsoever.”
- Active around 1940s America, Kinetic Art
- Set movement at the heart of his aesthetic, initiating a lifelong exploration of suspended forms that could be set in motion by a current of air.
- His works were called Mobiles and Stabiles. His works reflected the universe of abstracted sizes.
Rene Magritte
“The mind loves the unknown”
- Active around the 1930s in Belgium, Surrealism
- Cultivated a bland matter-of-fact. Believed that his paintings are descriptions of a thought whose only terms are the figures of the visible world.
- Avoided symbolic meanings.
Henry Moore
Lucio Fontana
Louise Nevelson
Alberto Giacometti
Jean Dubuffet
Mark Rothko
Salvador Dali
Willem de Kooning
