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Contemporary Art History > Exam 1 > Flashcards

Exam 1 Flashcards

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1
Q
A

Agnes Martin, Night Sea (1963)

Artist Response to Abstract Expressionism, chose to continue painting, but with reduced gestures and repeated movements

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2
Q
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Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955)

Documentary about the holocaust

Released around the 1945 break between Modernism and Contemporary Art

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3
Q
A

Andre Masson, Battle of Fishes (1926)

Surrealist, painting is an example of Automatism

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4
Q
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Thomas Hart Benton, Spring on the Missouri (1945)

Prewar American Artist, example of Regionalism

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5
Q
A

Isabel Bishop, Dante and Virgil in Union Square (1932)

Prewar American Artist, example of American Scene Painting

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6
Q
A

Jean Dubuffet, The Exemplary Life of the Soil (1958)

Artist during the time of Postwar Paris Break

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7
Q
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Jean Dubuffet, Woman Grinding Coffee (1945)

Artist during Postwar Paris Break

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8
Q
A

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

Created during the Modernist Avant-Garde Era

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9
Q
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Marcel Duchamp, Tu m (1918)

Artist during Modernist Avant-Garde Era

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10
Q
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Jean Fautrier, Head of Hostage n 22 (1944)

Artist during Post War Paris Break

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11
Q
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Alberto Giacometti, City Square (1948)

Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break

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12
Q
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Alberto Giacometti, Head of a Man on a Rod (1947)

Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break

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13
Q
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Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing (1947)

Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break

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14
Q
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Alberto Giacometti, The Artists Mother (1950)

Surrealist Artist, Created during Post War Paris Break

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15
Q
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Adolph Gottlieb, Pictograph (1946)

Surrealist artist, argued painting was an expression of danger

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16
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Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930)

Pre War American artist, example of Regionalism

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17
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Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939)

Pre War American Artist, example of Early American Abstraction (Melancholy)

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18
Q
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Edward Hopper. Room in Brooklyn (1932)

Pre War American Artist, example of Early American Abstraction (Melancholy)

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19
Q
A

Jasper Johns, Flag (1954-5)

Example of response to Critics

Used encaustic technique with hot wax, painted over wax, left imprints of brush strokes

1) Constructing an encounter between painting and ready-made art.
2) “I’m making a flag, not painting or representing one.”
3) Johns says, “I am an allusionist. I make things that will allude to other things.”

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20
Q
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Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) (1960)

example of a response to critics

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21
Q
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Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts (1955)

example of response to critics

Piece revolved around Johns homosexuality

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22
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Klein, Untitled Anthropometry (1960)

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23
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Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, Panel n 1 (1940-1)

Pre War American Art, example of Social Realism

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24
Q
A

Morris Louis, Unfurled Series (1960)

Abstract expressionist painter

created artwork in accordance with Greenburg’s criticism

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25
Q
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Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1928-9)

Modernist Avant-Garde, Surrealist Artist

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26
Q
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Max Ernst, Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale (1924)

Modernist Avant-Garde, Surrealist artist

Example of synthetic cubism

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27
Q
A

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic 34 (1953-4)

Abstract expressionist painter

Criticized by Greenburg for referencing the real world

28
Q
A

Barnett Newman, Onement I (1948)

Abstract Expressionist artist

Zip is autographic gesture, draws the eye

29
Q
A

Barnett Newman, The Slaying of Osiris (1945)

Abstract expressionist painter

30
Q
A

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimus (1950-1)

Abstract Expressionist Painter

5 zips present in composition

31
Q
A

Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret (1943)

Abstract Expressionist Painter

32
Q
A

Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist (1950)

Abstract Expressionist Painter

33
Q
A

Jackson Pollock, Male and Female (1942)

Abstract Expressionist Painter

34
Q
A

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948 (1948)

Abstract Expressionist Painter

35
Q
A

Jackson Pollock, Shimmering Substance (1946)

Abstract Expressionist Painter

36
Q
A

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955)

Example of response to critics

37
Q
A

Robert Rauschenberg, Collection (1954)

Example of artist response to critics

38
Q
A

Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)

Example of artist response to critics

39
Q
A

Robert Rauschenberg, Rebus (1955)

Example of artist response to Critics

40
Q
A

Reginald Marsh, Twenty Cent Movie (1936)

Pre War American Artist, example of American Scene Painting

41
Q
A

Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red (1958)

Abstract Expressionist Painter

42
Q
A

Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow (1957)

Abstract expressionist painter

Felt that the squares were abstract performers that stood in for the human body

43
Q
A

Mark Rothko, Primeval Landscape (1944)

Abstract Expressionist Painter

44
Q
A

Frank Stella, At work on Black Paintings (1958-9)

Response to critic of abstract expressionism, continue painting but with reduced gestures and repeated movements

45
Q
A

Yves Klein, Leap into the Void (1960)

46
Q

Points on Existentialism

A

Existentialism comes from Jean-Paul Sartre. It deals with the ability to choose in a situation.

  • Authenticity, freedom, being-for-others, and choice (freedom and responsibility have a complex relationship)
  • Existence precedes essence (who you are is only formed by your choices)
  • Ethics: the accountability in postwar Europe, not nihilism
47
Q

Freud’s Ideas in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

A
  1. The unconscious is one’s true self or “real” life (Id, Ego, Super Ego)
  2. Freud’s system is based on the return of the repressed, that is, what one represses returns in some manner until it is dealt with.
  3. The primitive is the other side of civilization.
48
Q

4 Types of Early American Painting

A
  1. American Scene Painting: Everyday urban life in the United States
  2. Early American Abstraction
  3. Regionalism: Idealized scenes in country America, anti-immigrant, anti-semetic, anti-urban
  4. Social Realism: Art that consciously makes a political statement
49
Q

Carl Jung and Psychoanalysis

A
  • Disagreed with Freud on the importance of sexuality, believed instincts are desexualized.
  • Theory of shadow: “True” self that shadows the rational ego
  • Archetypes: universal images that appear in the mind of the individual
  • Collective Unconscious: all consciousness is linked individually through time and space
50
Q

Harold Rosenberg

A

Wrote The American Action Painters (1952)

  • Abstract expressionism represents a clean break with European style
  • Action is the key aspect. Act of painting is the art, not the final product
  • Emphasis on explosive, grand, or brutal actions
  • Canvas acts as a stage for the artist
  • Each artist in the abstract expressionist movement has their own individual existential struggle
  • Role of the critic is to make distinctions between real and fake struggles
51
Q

Clement Greenberg

A

Wrote Modernist Painting, American Type Painting

  • The history of the medium is a continuous evolution; there is no break with the past; “The Fate of Painting.”
  • What is extraneous or irrelevant gets dropped off, what remains is a reduction to its essential essence.
  • Every medium has an “area of competence” (photography and film deal with reality, painting should not)
52
Q

3 Aspects of The Fate of Painting

A
  1. essence of painting is flat surface (all effort of past art to make illusory pictoral space was false).
  2. Shape and frame of support (rectangular canvas must be emphasized)
  3. Purity of pigment (color is pure pigment)
53
Q

3 Responses to Critiques of Abstract Expressionism

A
  1. Continue Painting, but with reduced gestures, and more repeated gestures (many grid compositions)
  2. Happenings and Performance Art
  3. The Duchamp Access (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenbergs attempts to defy Rosenberg and Greenberg)
54
Q

Art Brut

A

A term associated with the postwar French art of Jean Dubuffet, Jean

Fautrier, and Wols. “Crude” or “raw,” outsider art, a new primitivism.

55
Q

Avant-Garde

A

Originally a French military term meaning “forward or advance

guard.” Within art and literature, the term refers to groups of Modernist writers and

artists whose work is formally (stylistically) innovative (defies convention). This formal

experimentation is usually combined with socio-political goals/ideas, that is, an

attempt to unite “art” and “life,” to gesture toward the construction of a more just

world, or even to negate the notion of artistic autonomy.

56
Q

Synthetic Cubism

A

A technique developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque

after 1912 in which they construct images through the use of collage and found

objects, which are applied to the canvas. The boundary between painting and

sculpture is blurred. It is a constructive technique that yields symbolic, chance images.

Important because it is an early instance of pre-made, everyday materials entering

pictorial space; they are presented rather than represented.

57
Q

Manifesto

A

A primary form of avant-garde discourse. The original model, which has

immense influence on later artistic statements, is the Communist Manifesto (1848) by

Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. The form allows for a powerful, persuasive

argument. Artistic manifestoes make didactic, aggressive, and often irrational
statements. A manifesto usually addresses (and often rejects) artistic precedents, lays

out an agenda of what the group wishes to accomplish and how, and provides their

views on art and society. It is a form of public address: the group announces its

arrival to the public.

Note also Andre Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).

58
Q

Surrealism

A

A twentieth-century European avant-garde group based in Paris. The

group was introduced by the First Manifesto of Surrealism, which was written by the

group’s leader André Breton in October 1924. The group sought to attain an

“absolute reality” in which contradictions or opposites cease to be so, that is, a

synthesis of opposites (dream and reality, fantastic and the mundane, unconscious

and conscious) into a surreality.

59
Q

Automatism

A

A concept from Surrealism. The pictorial equivalent of automatic

writing which aims to liberate the composition (poem, drawing, etc.) from conscious

(rational) control; embraces chance, accidents, not being in control. Automatic

writing is defined by Breton as “direct dictation from the unconscious mind”; thus, it is

a concept derived from Freudian free association techniques that is used to create

analogical imagery supposedly presented without editing or correction.

60
Q

Indexical Sign

A

In semiotics (the science of signs), a type of sign in which the

relation between the signifier and the referent is based on factual or existential

contiguity. It is a type of sign based on cause and effect, e.g., smoke is an index of

fire or a footprint. Marks or traces of a particular (not arbitrary) cause and that

cause is the thing to which they refer.

61
Q

Exquisite Corpse

A

Surrealist communal game of visual chance in which different

parts of a body are drawn by different participants. Group activity. Challenges the

traditional notion of an author/artist as a single, expressive individual.

62
Q

Informe

A

Formless.

63
Q

Primitivism

A

A primary cultural myth of the West (Europe and America) that

constructs a non-white, “prehistorial” Other through a set of contradictory terms:

childish, frightening, savage, “natural,” etc. Think of the concept of the “noble

savage.”

64
Q

Abstract Expressionism

A

(aka The New York School, The Irascibles). A group of

artists in New York City (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Mark

Rothko, Barnett Newman, et. al.) that represents the triumph of abstraction in the

pstwar period; abstraction as the quintessential “American” art.

65
Q

Post-painterly Abstraction

A

Coined by Greenberg to refer to the work of

Frankenthaler, Louis, and others. The paint seems to compose itself; artist’s gesture is

displaced by medium-based processes and systems. Little intervention by the artist.

Color absorbed directly into the weave of the raw canvas.

66
Q

Black Mountain College

A

A small, progressive art school in Asheville, NC that

opened in 1933 The school’s headmaster was Josef Albers, who taught at the

Bauhaus in Germany before that art school was dissolved by the Nazis.

Contemporary Art History (3 decks)

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