exam 3

Question 1

Orientalism

Answer 1

A fascination with Middle Eastern cultures that inspired eclectic nineteenth-century European fantasies of exotic life that often formed the subject of paintings.

Question 2

Primitivism

Answer 2

The borrowing of subjects or forms, usually from non-European or prehistoric sources, by Western artists in an attempt to infuse work with expressive qualities attributed to other cultures, especially colonized cultures.

Question 3

Symbolism

Answer 3

inner meaning rather than depicting external reality

Question 4

Classicism

Answer 4

The following of ancient Greek or Roman principles and style, generally associated with harmony, restraint, and adherence to recognized standards of form and craftsmanship, especially from the Renaissance to the 18th century.

Question 5

Modernism

Answer 5

economic, social and political development and change in art and culture.

Question 6

Modernization

Answer 6

economic, social and political development and change, and includes phenomena like industrialization and urbanization (ie. city).

Question 7

Haussmanization

Answer 7

The creative destruction of something for the betterment of society.

Question 8

French Revolution dates

Answer 8

1789-1799

Question 9

1830 Revolution dates (France)

Answer 9

July 1830

Question 10

François Boucher, Triumph of Venus, 1740

Answer 10

Rococo piece.
Venus on the waves is attended to by saidrs/nymphs. Fantasy, tone is airy and light.
Rococo is upbeat, light, and superfluous. Restfulness.
Middle class art emerging. The Enlightenment.
The goddess Venus emerges from the sea, carried aloft on a wave upon a mother-of-pearl shell and surrounded by admirers. Naiads, nymphs, and gods float among dolphins and doves, winged cupids floating above them.

Question 11

David, Oath of the Horatii, 1785

Answer 11

What we see is a father handing swords to his 3 sons. To the side, there are 3 women weeping.
Story: Three Horatii brothers were sent to fight three Curiatii brothers. The drama lay in the fact that one of the sisters of the Curiatii was married to one of the Horatii, while one of the sisters of the Horatii was betrothed to one of the Curiatii. Despite the ties between the two families, the Horatii’s father exhorts his sons to fight the Curiatii and they obey, despite the lamentations of the women. One of the Horatii brothers kills his sister Camilla’s beloved from the Curatii camp, and he kills her in rage, but is later pardoned by his father.
Neoclassicism, action, reason, stoicism, realism.

Question 12

David, Death of Marat, 1793

Answer 12

Refers to Marat (journalist, politically left). Painting very different than the illustrations of the event. Doesn’t show the action. Emotion: muted, subdued, quiet, neoclassicism.
David’s painting is tightly composed and powerfully stark. The background is blank, adding to the quiet mood and timeless feeling of the picture, just as the very different background of the Oath of the Horatii added to its drama. The color of Marat’s pale body coordinates with the bloodstained sheets on which he lies, creating a compact shape that is framed by the dark background and green blanket draped over the bathtub. David transforms a brutal event into an elegiac statement of somber eloquence. Marat’s pose, which echoes Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà (see fig. 21–14), implies that, like Christ, Marat was a martyr for the people.

Question 13

Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1831 (Revolution of 1830)

Answer 13

Lady liberty leading a group of people. The young kid stands for the working class. The old guy stands for the upper class. She is depicted as an allegorical and real figure.
In his large modern history painting Delacroix memorialized the July 1830 revolution just a few months after it took place. Although it records aspects of the actual event, it also departs from the facts in ways that further the intended message. This dramatic example of Romantic painting is full of passion, turmoil, and danger—part real and part dream.
The revolution aspect is real, but Liberty is not.

Question 14

Goya, Third of May 1808, 1814

Answer 14

Avant-garde: ahead of time. The essence of Romanticism.
Goya’s work seemed to have a prophetic nature, although dark. The figure in white is what the work is centered around and is incredibly important. The power comes from the passion of the people that are being shot. The French execute their prisoners. Goya was the first person to put the figures of war at the center of the painting.
The French attack in Spain and it is bloody. It was close to impossible for Goya to produce art about the war with the French still ruling. He focuses on the expressions of the people and the way they feel about their eminent death.

Question 15

Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849

Answer 15

Stone breakers represent the disenfranchised peasants on whose backs modern life was being built. In academic art, monumental canvases were reserved for heroic subjects, so Courbet was asserting that peasant laborers should be venerated as heroes. Courbet saw these men by the road and asked them to pose for him. Social realism. Darker, heavier.

Question 16

Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849

Answer 16

The guy recently dies, this was where he was supposed to be buried. Inspired by the 1848 funeral of Courbet’s maternal grandfather, Jean-Antoine Oudot, a veteran of the French Revolution of 1789. Courbet’s depiction has none of the idealization of traditional history painting; instead, it captures the awkward, blundering numbness of a real funeral and emphasizes its brutal, physical reality.
All real, ordinary people.

Question 17

Caillebotte, The Europe Bridge, 1876

Answer 17

The man with the woman is a Flaneur (upper class street lounger/watcher). 
The woman in black is often interpreted as a prostitute. 
The painting shows how different social classes may meet on the streets but do not converse with one another.

Question 18

Raimondi after Raphael, Judgment of Paris, c. 1520

Answer 18

Painter Raphael and the great Italian engraver Raimondi.
Depicted here is the incident that sparked the Trojan War: Paris being forced to decide which goddess—Juno, Minerva, or Venus—was the most beautiful. He chose Venus, seen receiving the golden apple upon promising to help him woo the most beautiful woman alive, Helen of Troy.

Question 19

Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863

Answer 19

Naked woman has no shame. The most scandalous aspect of the painting was the “immorality” of Manet’s theme: a suburban picnic featuring two fully dressed bourgeois gentlemen seated alongside a completely naked woman with another scantily dressed woman in the background. Manet apparently conceived of Luncheon on the Grass as a modern version of a Venetian Renaissance painting in the Louvre, The Pastoral Concert.

Question 20

Titian, Venus of Urbino, c. 1538

Answer 20

For the Duke of Urbino. It is almost certainly celebrating marital love and the physical intimacy between man and wife, a supposition supported by a number of details. In her right hand, for instance, the girl holds a posy of roses, which usually symbolize love; also, the sleeping dog is a common symbol of fidelity; lastly, the maids in the background are depicted rummaging in a traditional cassone, where wives commonly stored their trousseaux. Perhaps the picture was conceived as an ideal model of behaviour for Giuliana, the Duke’s young bride.

Question 21

Manet, Olympia, Salon of 1865

Answer 21

Manet’s Olympia was based on a Venetian Renaissance source, Titian’s “Venus” of Urbino.
Titian’s female is curvaceous and softly rounded; Manet’s is angular and flattened. Titian’s colors are warm and rich; Manet’s are cold and harsh. Titian’s “Venus” looks coyly at the male spectator; Manet’s Olympia appears indifferent. And instead of looking up at us, Olympia gazes down at us, indicating that she is in the position of power and that we are subordinate, like the black servant at the foot of the bed who brings her a bouquet of flowers.

Question 22

Monet, La Grenouillère (The Frog’s Place), 1869

Answer 22

La Grenouillere (Frog-Pool) was a very popular bathing and boating place on the Seine close to Bougival, where Monet was living and working in 1869. During the 1860s it had become a weekend Mecca for Parisians, who enjoyed the rural surroundings and the floating restaurant. Monet was also experimenting with new ways of reflecting water – using huge broad strokes of brown, white and blue. His preference for treating forms in bold masses, juxtaposing patches of colour and suppressing unnecessary detail echoed Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts.
Monet was the driving force behind French Impressionism.

Question 23

Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère c. 1882

Answer 23

mirror behind her.
The woman looks at us as if we are her next customer. She seems weary from her work: hands raw, sleeves rolled up, not greeting with a smile.
Her gold bracelets make it seem like she might be a consumer good, sexually.
Manet seems not to have offered a single, determinate position from which to confidently make sense of the whole.
MODERNISM.

Question 24

Renoir, The Loge, 1874

Answer 24

Loge: opera box
beautiful face, makeup, elaborate dress. She looks slightly away from the viewer.
HOW WE SEE THINGS. The painting tells us how to see.
Are men just ones who look and paint (agents/subjects)?
Are women just ones who are looked at and painted (objects)?

Question 25

Cassatt, Woman in Black at the Opera, 1879

Answer 25

possibly looking at the stage. She is actively looking, ignoring us. We are like the man across the balcony. She is forceful and powerful. Done by a woman, subjective view. Viewed in profile, the woman looks intently and severely through opera glasses at the stage. Her body is not offered up as the viewer cannot see her form underneath her black dress and there is no skin visible. Because she is represented in profile and holds the glasses to her face, the viewer cannot get a good look at her. Instead of gracefully displaying her fan, she holds it sternly and wields it like a weapon. She is here to see the play and wants to be left alone. Behind her, men and women are using their opera glasses to gaze at one another. To poke fun at the role of the man at the opera, Cassatt has a man leaning far over the balcony, comically staring at the woman in black through his glasses.

Question 26

Morisot, View of Paris from the Trocadero, 1872

Answer 26

The three figures in the foreground are probably Morisot’s sisters. They are separated from the cityscape beyond by a dark but porous fence, and the road on which they stand is a dusty beige, likely indicative of the way in which Morisot and her sisters, as bourgeois women, were excluded from the everyday life of the city and from many professional opportunities as artists.

Question 27

Hiroshige, People on a Bridge Surprised by Rain, 1857

Answer 27

Woodblock print in ukiyo style.
part of 100 Famous Views of Edo.
Prints were popular in Japan and Europe in the impressionist movement.

Question 28

Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, c. 1830

Answer 28

The great wave rears up like a dragon with claws of foam, ready to crash down on the figures huddled in the boats below. Exactly at the point of imminent disaster, but far in the distance, rises Japan’s most sacred peak, Mount Fuji, whose slopes swing up like waves and whose snowy crown is like foam—comparisons the artist makes clear in the wave nearest us. There are fisherman are rowing trying to escape the wave. Linear perspective from the Western influence. Nature is large, we are small.

Question 29

Thomas Cole, The Hunter’s Return, 1845

Answer 29

In this image it can be seen that the landscape is not untouched by the people. The men who are carrying the hunt are impacting nature. As well as the house, which is built out of the logs. And the Native Americans were making distinctive marks. The people had to transform nature to make it useful. Our eye travels through it with pleasure, seeing a nostalgic view of landscape. He has the sky with clouds, the mountain range with the sunset reflecting on it. The lake in the middle ground is being framed by the colorful trees.

Question 30

Gauguin, Vision after the Sermon, 1888

Answer 30

Jacob wrestling with the Angel (Genesis 32:24)
The Breton women, dressed in distinctive regional costume, have just listened to a sermon based on a passage from the Bible. Genesis (32:22-32) relates the story of Jacob, who, after fording the river Jabbok with his family, spent a whole night wrestling with a mysterious angel.

Question 31

Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (Spirit of the Dead Watching), 1892

Answer 31

A Tahitian female lies naked on her belly, terrified by the presence of the spirit of death.
According to island mythology, the title has two meanings: either the young girl is thinking of the ghost, or the ghost is thinking of her. Gauguin described the incident that prompted the painting in his diary. Returning home late one night he struck a match and saw his wife, Tehura, “immobile, naked, lying face down on the bed with the eyes inordinately large with fear… Might she not with her frightened face take me for one of the demons and spectres of the Tupaupaus, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights?” Native polynesians believe that the phosphorescences of the light are the spirits of the dead.

Question 32

Cézanne, Apples and Oranges, c. 1895-1900

Answer 32

Apples as a symbol of desire. Diagonal table cloth. Cloth background=landscape.
The still life of Apples and Oranges shows excellent control by the artist. Cézanne takes individual elements and blends them to create a perfectly balanced scene. He doesn’t let the bright-coloured fruits overwhelm everything else going on in the scene. Even though the setting is crowded, the arrangement offers a sense of spaciousness. The painter adds the folds of the tablecloth and the drapery in a way that brings the picture to life. It’s easy to feel the white tablecloth flowing down the table. Although the scene includes a lot of folds, there is stability in all of it.

Question 33

Cézanne, Large Bathers, c. 1906

Answer 33

Coming together of his overarching ambitions. Modern: bodies have a lot of distortion, you can see the canvas, desire for female sexuality.
probably begun in the last year of his life and left unfinished, was the largest canvas he ever painted. It returns in several ways to the academic conventions of history painting as a monumental, multi-figured composition of nude figures in a landscape setting that suggests a mythological theme. The bodies cluster in two pyramidal groups at left and right, beneath a canopy of trees that opens in the middle onto a triangular expanse of water, landscape, and sky. The figures assume statuesque, often Classical poses and seem to exist outside recognizable time and space.

Question 34

Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon (Ladies of Avignon), 1907

Answer 34

Meant to evoke fear, something dangerous. It is done in a western way, but it is also very true to African culture. For This piece, it was common for men to bring their sons to a brothel for sexual initiation. Picasso was in an existential crisis.
5 prostitutes. It pulls you in by the women looking seductive, woman opening the curtain. It pushes you out by the scary masks, pointy watermelon.

apotropaic = to ward off evil. It’s more like a religious object.

Question 35

Picasso, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), winter 1911-12

Answer 35

breaks away from realism.

Question 36

Power figure (Nkisi Nkonde), Congo, 19th century

Answer 36

“spirit figure to hunt”: hunting enemies. Each client who uses the power modifies the figure by adding nails. Everyone who adds to it is an artist.
A hunter object used by chiefs, elders, and diviners to help administer justice in their local communities.

Question 37

Initiation wall panels, Nkanu peoples (Congo), early 20th century

Answer 37

Used in a Kikaku for initiation rituals. Members of the Belgian military force.

Question 38

Absolutism

Answer 38

When monarchical power is unrestrained by the church or the legislature. Nobles become less important.

Question 39

First estate:
Second estate:
Third estate:

Answer 39

clergy
nobility
commoners (doing all the work)

Question 40

Monet depicts

Answer 40

ordinary ppl! Impressionism.

Question 41

Manet is

Answer 41

politically radical! Modernism.

Question 42

Critics complaints about CORBET’s paintings:

Answer 42

They were just average people. He depicted peasants in the way they ACTUALLY were. They were really dark. Top long one: it did not depict the afterlife. Particularity, contemporarity, ugly, too dark.
Corbet was a realist, he showed people what they didn’t want to see, the brute reality.

Question 43

Voyeurism

Answer 43

a detached, pleasurable looking, usually with sexual connotations.