Exam 1 Flashcards
Agnes Martin, Night Sea (1963)
Artist Response to Abstract Expressionism, chose to continue painting, but with reduced gestures and repeated movements
Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955)
Documentary about the holocaust
Released around the 1945 break between Modernism and Contemporary Art
Andre Masson, Battle of Fishes (1926)
Surrealist, painting is an example of Automatism
Thomas Hart Benton, Spring on the Missouri (1945)
Prewar American Artist, example of Regionalism
Isabel Bishop, Dante and Virgil in Union Square (1932)
Prewar American Artist, example of American Scene Painting
Jean Dubuffet, The Exemplary Life of the Soil (1958)
Artist during the time of Postwar Paris Break
Jean Dubuffet, Woman Grinding Coffee (1945)
Artist during Postwar Paris Break
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)
Created during the Modernist Avant-Garde Era
Marcel Duchamp, Tu m (1918)
Artist during Modernist Avant-Garde Era
Jean Fautrier, Head of Hostage n 22 (1944)
Artist during Post War Paris Break
Alberto Giacometti, City Square (1948)
Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break
Alberto Giacometti, Head of a Man on a Rod (1947)
Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break
Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing (1947)
Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break
Alberto Giacometti, The Artists Mother (1950)
Surrealist Artist, Created during Post War Paris Break
Adolph Gottlieb, Pictograph (1946)
Surrealist artist, argued painting was an expression of danger
Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930)
Pre War American artist, example of Regionalism
Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939)
Pre War American Artist, example of Early American Abstraction (Melancholy)
Edward Hopper. Room in Brooklyn (1932)
Pre War American Artist, example of Early American Abstraction (Melancholy)
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.”
Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) (1960)
example of a response to critics
Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts (1955)
example of response to critics
Piece revolved around Johns homosexuality
Klein, Untitled Anthropometry (1960)
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, Panel n 1 (1940-1)
Pre War American Art, example of Social Realism
Morris Louis, Unfurled Series (1960)
Abstract expressionist painter
created artwork in accordance with Greenburg’s criticism
Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1928-9)
Modernist Avant-Garde, Surrealist Artist
Max Ernst, Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale (1924)
Modernist Avant-Garde, Surrealist artist
Example of synthetic cubism
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic 34 (1953-4)
Abstract expressionist painter
Criticized by Greenburg for referencing the real world
Barnett Newman, Onement I (1948)
Abstract Expressionist artist
Zip is autographic gesture, draws the eye
Barnett Newman, The Slaying of Osiris (1945)
Abstract expressionist painter
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimus (1950-1)
Abstract Expressionist Painter
5 zips present in composition
Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret (1943)
Abstract Expressionist Painter
Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist (1950)
Abstract Expressionist Painter
Jackson Pollock, Male and Female (1942)
Abstract Expressionist Painter
Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948 (1948)
Abstract Expressionist Painter
Jackson Pollock, Shimmering Substance (1946)
Abstract Expressionist Painter
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955)
Example of response to critics
Robert Rauschenberg, Collection (1954)
Example of artist response to critics
Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)
Example of artist response to critics
Robert Rauschenberg, Rebus (1955)
Example of artist response to Critics
Reginald Marsh, Twenty Cent Movie (1936)
Pre War American Artist, example of American Scene Painting
Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red (1958)
Abstract Expressionist Painter
Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow (1957)
Abstract expressionist painter
Felt that the squares were abstract performers that stood in for the human body
Mark Rothko, Primeval Landscape (1944)
Abstract Expressionist Painter
Frank Stella, At work on Black Paintings (1958-9)
Response to critic of abstract expressionism, continue painting but with reduced gestures and repeated movements
Yves Klein, Leap into the Void (1960)
Points on Existentialism
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
Freud’s Ideas in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
- The unconscious is one’s true self or “real” life (Id, Ego, Super Ego)
- 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.
- The primitive is the other side of civilization.
4 Types of Early American Painting
- American Scene Painting: Everyday urban life in the United States
- Early American Abstraction
- Regionalism: Idealized scenes in country America, anti-immigrant, anti-semetic, anti-urban
- Social Realism: Art that consciously makes a political statement
Carl Jung and Psychoanalysis
- 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
Harold Rosenberg
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
Clement Greenberg
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)
3 Aspects of The Fate of Painting
- essence of painting is flat surface (all effort of past art to make illusory pictoral space was false).
- Shape and frame of support (rectangular canvas must be emphasized)
- Purity of pigment (color is pure pigment)
3 Responses to Critiques of Abstract Expressionism
- Continue Painting, but with reduced gestures, and more repeated gestures (many grid compositions)
- Happenings and Performance Art
- The Duchamp Access (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenbergs attempts to defy Rosenberg and Greenberg)
Art Brut
A term associated with the postwar French art of Jean Dubuffet, Jean
Fautrier, and Wols. “Crude” or “raw,” outsider art, a new primitivism.
Avant-Garde
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.
Synthetic Cubism
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.
Manifesto
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).
Surrealism
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.
Automatism
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.
Indexical Sign
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.
Exquisite Corpse
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.
Informe
Formless.
Primitivism
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.”
Abstract Expressionism
(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.
Post-painterly Abstraction
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.
Black Mountain College
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.
