Exam 5

Question 1

Answer 1

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, Main Building, 1925-1926, concrete and glass, Dessau, Germany

• Stark in colors, does not take away or disguise the materials used
• Lots of glass, sense of transparency
• Essentially boxes, not about what kind of cool curves or whatever we can make out of that stuff

Question 2

Answer 2

Marcel Breuer, Wassily Chair, 1925, Chrome-plated tubular steel and canvas, Germany

• named after Wassily Kandinsky
• very abstract design, but with practical materials

Question 3

Answer 3

Le Corbusier, Still Life, oil on canvas, France, 1920

• homeboy had some serious issues with machines, thought that using machines was frad and createad a superficial mask, hated art deco
• alludes directly to architectural forms
• rendered by flat planes of color
• determined by golden section? grid of regulating lines

Question 4

Answer 4

George Davison, The Onion Field, 1889, England, photogravure reproduction of photograph taken with pinhole camera

Question 5

Answer 5

Hannah Hoch, The Beautiful Girl, 1919-1920, photomontage, Germany

• Very industrial
• Stopwatch, new idea of time, idea of working on the clock

Question 6

Answer 6

Albert Renger-Patzsch, Smokestacks, From The World is Beautiful, photograph, 1928, Germany

• “the secret of good photography is that it can obtain artistic qulities just like a work of art, through its realism”
• “The World is Beautiful” is a book written by Renger-Patzsch
• Neue Sachlichkeit photography; “new objective,” practical engagement with the world, hard fact, business-like

Question 7

Answer 7

Germaine Krull, Self-Portrait with Ikarette, 1925, Photograph, Germany

• Camera is an extension of herself
• Not giving us a lot of identification
• Slightly androgynous
• several tropes of modernity: act of photographic recording, substitution of the camera for her eye
• idea of the “new woman” technology and cigs

Question 8

Answer 8

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-29, oil on canvas, Belgian

• left a legacy in commercial art
• known for mixing words and images (almost like an ad of poster in come cases like this one)
• he wants to separate association of the object to what it’s called
• it’s very plain visually, but is really a thought-piece
• there’s a sexual undertone too with a different translation of “une pipe”

Question 9

Answer 9

Joan Miró, The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), 1923-1924, Oil on canvas, Spain

• mix of human, anima/organic forms mixed with more science-related objects
• no order to it, confusion with interaction of elements

Question 10

Answer 10

Hans Bellmer, Untitled from La Poupée (The Doll), c. 1934, gelatin silver print, German

• a lot of his work was creepy, maybe a reaction to the Nazi’s and their view of the perfect human body
• he reacted to this by making the body grotesque and scary looking
• the artist fled the nazi’s at one point

Question 11

Answer 11

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, France (born Spain)

• just at the moment the Nazi’s were rising to power
• combing in the human figure with insights of the experiments he had been doing with animal and style
• pain and reaction of victims of bombing can be seen in how his figures look - showing the aftermath
• interesting question to think about: why is it black and white? maybe to be more plain about WHAT it’s representing?
• painted in six weeks
• hybrid cubist-surrealist
• four women in terror, one falls from house in flames, two flee in fear, and the last cradles her dead child
• combats the belief that political art can only be socila realist and that modernist art can never be public