BACKGROUND OF ART Flashcards
It means Old Stone Age is a term used to define the oldest period in human history.
Paleolithic
It began about two million years ago, with the use of the first stone tools. Minerals and plants were used to make colors for the paintings seen in caves.
Paleolithic (prehistoric art)
It is the period of middle stone age, from about 10,000 - 5,000BC. This is a period when humans developed new techniques of stone working.
Mesolithic
It also referred to as the New Stone Age. It began when man first developed agriculture and settled in permanent villages. It ended with the discovery of bronze. The prime medium for this period was pottery. Megalithic monuments also arose in this period.
Neolithic
It is between approximately 5000 BC and 300 AD, “advanced” civilizations (generally, those with written language) thrived in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Sumeria, Akkadia, Mexico, Rome, Japan, China, and India.
Art played an important role in these growing societies by providing a means to enforce religious and political order.
It includes symbolic imagery alongside text (hieroglyphs) that tells stories and exalts rulers, gods, and goddesses.
Ancient Art
is considered by some to be the foundation of all of art history.
Ancient art
There were many unique genres of art, such as Crusade art or animal style.
The art of this period can be considered relatively “dark” as well. Some depicted rather grotesque or otherwise brutal scenes while others were focused on formalized religion. Yet, the majority are not what we would call cheery.
It also saw the rise of the “illuminated manuscript” and eventually the Gothic and Romanesque styles of art and architecture.
Dark ages
Medieval Art
This period has been characterized by explosion of creative genius.
Painting especially reached its peak of technical competence, rich artistic imagination and heroic composition.
The main characteristics of paintings are harmony and balance in construction.
was a form of art that removed the extraneous detail and showed the world as is was.
Humanism
Renaissance
The Creation of Adam The Last Supper Mona Lisa The Last Judgment Assumption of the Virgin
Renaissance
It used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music.
It was a reflection of the profound political and cultural changes then emerging across Europe.
Baroque
It is characterized by great drama, rich color, and intense light and dark shadows.
It was meant to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance.
Baroque
It is characterized by elaborate ornamentation, asymmetrical values, pastel color palette, and curved or serpentine lines.
It is often depict themes of love, classical myths, youth, and playfulness.
Rococo
It is characterized by pastel colors, gracefully delicate curving forms, fanciful figures, and a light-hearted mood.
It is characterized by lightness, elegance, and an exuberant use of curving natural forms in ornamentation.
In general was characterized by easygoing, light-hearted treatments of mythological and courtship themes, rich and delicate brushwork, a relatively light tonal key, and sensuous coloring.
Rococo
Pilgrimage to Cythera by Antoine Watteau
Blond Odalisque by Francois Boucher
Pygmalion and Galatee by Etienne-Maurice Falconet
Rococo
is considered to be the first great Rococo painter who influenced later Rococo masters such as Boucher and Fragonard.
Antoine Watteau
It is characterized by the use of straight lines, a smooth paint surface, and the depiction of light, a minimal use of color, and the clear, crisp definition of forms.
Its subject matter usually relates to either Greco-Roman history or other cultural attributes, such as allegory and virtue.
The softness of paint application and light-hearted and “frivolous” subject matter that characterize Rococo painting is recognized as the opposite of this.
Typically, the subject matter of this painting consisted of the depiction of events from history, mythological scenes, and the architecture and ruins of ancient Rome.
NEOCLASSICISM
The works of ______are usually hailed as the epitome of Neoclassical painting.
Jacques-Louis David
It can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular.
It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general.
It emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
Romanticism
arose in opposition to Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the late 18th century.
REALISM
often depicted common laborers, and ordinary people in ordinary surroundings engaged in real activities as subjects for their works.
REALISM
He is known as the main proponent of Realism and his paintings challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects.
Gustave Courbet
It is a 19th century movement known for its paintings that aimed to depict the transience of light, and to capture scenes of modern life and the natural world in their ever-shifting conditions.
IMPRESSIONISM
They typically painted scenes of modern life and often painted outdoors.
Typically, they portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, and used short, “broken” brush strokes of mixed and unmixed color to achieve an effect of intense color vibration.
It captured ordinary subjects, engaged in day to day activities in both rural and urban settings.
These artists relaxed the boundary between subject and background so that the effect of an impressionist painting often resembles a snapshot, a part of a larger reality captured as if by chance.
The development of this can be considered partly as a reaction by artists to the challenge presented by photography
IMPRESSIONISM
The term ____ is derived from the title of Claude Monet’s painting, Impression, soleil levant (“Impression, Sunrise”).
IMPRESSIONISM
It used pure, brilliant colour aggressively applied straight from the paint tubes to create a sense of an explosion on the canvas.
It is painted directly from nature, as the Impressionists had before them, but the artists in this period were invested with a strong expressive reaction to the subjects portrayed.
It were interested in the scientific colour theories developed in the nineteenth century – particularly those relating to complementary colors.
FAUVISM
It is characterized by strong colors and fierce brushwork.
FAUVISM
founded fauvism
Henri Matisse and André Derain
The colour in particular can be highly intense and non-naturalistic, brushwork is typically free and paint application tends to be generous and highly textured.
Tends to be emotional and sometimes mystical. It can be seen as an extension of Romanticism.
EXPRESSIONISM
It is not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person.
The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.
EXPRESSIONISM
refers to art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas
EXPRESSIONISM
Edvard Munch: The Scream
EXPRESSIONISM
It was the first abstract art style.
It abandoned the tradition of perspective drawing and displayed many views of a subject at one time.
was an attempt by artists to revitalize the tired traditions of Western art which they believed had run their course.
CUBISM
It emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modelling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honored theories that art should imitate nature.
were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space. Instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects
CUBISM
Cubism was a truly revolutionary style of modern art developed by
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques
It aimed to revolutionize human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life in favor of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams.
It used automatic drawing or writing to unlock ideas and images from their unconscious minds, and others sought to depict dream worlds or hidden psychological tensions.
SURREALISM
It has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic, and nihilistic.
Abstract Expressionism
It is employed familiar mass culture imagery from advertisements to other banal objects, wrapping it into sensational and bold colour combinations.
pop art
is probably the first major pop art icon to become the influential figure in the fashion world.
Andy Warhol
It is optically distorted geometric patterns in black and white produced a whole range of movements on a surface.
It is primarily two-dimensional mostly black and white patterns which optically distort and give the illusion of movement.
OP ART
are made into their minimal and simple forms (no more than multiples of colors) without modifications.
MINIMALISM
It refers to the sensuality of ideas rather than making it emotively.
Idealistic
Sophisticated
Use of more photos as an art form
CONCEPTUAL ART
It refers to recently produced visual art.
It includes modern architecture, digital imaging, new age video and music, etc.
It’s quite possible that a work of ____art will never find a meaningful place in the history of art.
Contemporary
