ARTH111.2 Flashcards
Enlightenment
The Western philosophy based on empirical evidence that dominated the 18th century. The Enlightenment was a new way of thinking critically about the world and about humankind, independently of religion, myth, or tradition.
Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927
John Constable, The Haywain, 1821. Oil on canvas, 4’ 3 ¼” x 6’ 1”.
Regionalism
Regionalism A 20th-century American art movement that portrayed American rural life in a clearly readable, Realist style. Major Regionalists include Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton.
Mary Cassatt, The Bath c. 1892. Oil on Canvas.
Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963
Nadar (Gaspar-Félix Touranchon), Eugene Delacroix c. 1855
Abstract Expressionism
gestural abstraction Also known as action painting. A kind of abstract painting in which the gesture, or act of painting, is seen as the subject of art. Its most renowned proponent was Jackson Pollock.
Emotion
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969
George Braque, The Portuguese, 1911
Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930
Vincent Van Gogh, Night Café, 1888.. Oil on Canvas.
Dadaism
An early-20th-century art movement prompted by a revulsion against the horror of World War I. Dada embraced political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. A disdain for convention, often enlivened by humor or whimsy, is characteristic of the art the Dadaists produced.
Gustav Caillebotte, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877. Oil on Canvas.
Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, 1884-86. Oil on Canvas.
Abstraction
Non-representational; forms and colors arranged without reference to the depiction of an object.
Barbizon School
Millet was one of a group of French painters of country life who, to be close to their rural subjects, settled near the village of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau.
This Barbizon School specialized in detailed pictures of forest and countryside. Millet, their most prominent member, was of peasant stock and identified with the hard lot of the country poor.
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958
Eva Hesse, Hang-Up, 1965-66
Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52
Frank Stella, Mas o Menos, 1964
fin-de-siècle
French, “end of the century.” A period in Western cultural history from the end of the 19thcentury until just before World War I, when decadence and indulgence masked anxiety about an uncertain future.
Cubism
An early-20th-century art movement that rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world. See also Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism.
Analytic Cubism The first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in which the artists analyzed form from every possible vantage point to combine the various views into one pictorial whole.
Synthetic Cubism A later phase of Cubism, in which paintings and drawings were constructed from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject, in order to engage the viewer with pictorial issues, such as figuration, realism, and abstraction.
Jean Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17
Post-impressionism
The term used to describe the stylistically heterogeneous work of the group of late-19th-century painters in France, including van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Cézanne, who more systematically examined the properties and expressive qualities of line, ther from the viewer they are intended to seem. Atmospheric, or aerial, perspective creates the illusion of distance by the greater diminution of color intensity, the shift in color toward an almost neutral blue, and the blurring of contours as the intended distance between eye and object increases.
Surrealism
A successor to Dada, Surrealism incorporated the improvisational nature of its predecessor into its exploration of the ways to express in art the world of dreams and the unconscious. Biomorphic Surrealists, such as Joan Miró, produced largely abstract compositions. Naturalistic Surrealists, notably Salvador Dalí, presented recognizable scenes transformed into a dream or nightmare image.
color field painting
A variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction in which artists sought to reduce painting to its physical essence by pouring diluted paint onto unprimed canvas and letting these pigments soak into the fabric, as exemplifi ed by the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.
Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red, 1908
Lithography
In 1798, the German printmaker Alois Senefelder (1771–1834) created the first prints using stone instead of metal plates or wooden blocks. In contrast to earlier printing techniques (see “Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings,” Chapter 20), in which the artist applied ink either to a raised or incised surface, in lithography (Greek, “stone writing”) the printing and nonprinting areas of the plate are on the same plane.
The chemical phenomenon fundamental to lithography is the repellence of oil and water. The lithographer uses a greasy, oil-based crayon to draw directly on a stone plate and then wipes water onto the stone, which clings only to the areas the drawing does not cover. Next, the artist rolls oil-based ink onto the stone, which adheres to the drawing but is repelled by the water. When the artist presses the stone against paper, only the inked areas—the drawing—transfer to the paper. Colorlithography requires multiple plates, one for each color, and the printmaker must take special care to make sure each impression lines up perfectly with the previous one so that each color prints in its proper place.
One of the earliest masters of this new printmaking process was Honoré Daumier, whose politically biting lithographs (FIG. 27-29) published in a widely read French journal reached an audience of unprecedented size.
Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-29
Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960
Aaron Douglas, Noah’s Ark, c. 1927
Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857 (2x3 ft)
Romanticism
A Western cultural phenomenon, beginning around 1750 and ending about 1850, that gave precedence to feeling and imagination over reason and thought. More narrowly, the art movement that flourished from about 1800 to 1840.