Final

Question 1

Cornelia Presenting Her Children as Her Treasures

Answer 1

Angelica Kauffman, c. 1780

Neoclassicism
Switzerland
Uses classism to inspire restraint and scholarly study (the enlightenment has made it hard to believe in the unseen)
Didactic, values good mothers.
French academy controls education and status in art
Study ancient rome, then study nature
Good art is HISTORY painting (machine size canvas)
Then royal portraiture, then genre painting, then landscape. Still life is the WORST.
Cornelia is unmoving, like a pillar

Question 2

Oath of the Horatii

Answer 2

Jacques-Louis David, 1780

Neoclassicism
Discovery of Pompeii inspires depiction of the classical world
The american revolution was inspired by the enlightenment (EX: Jean Jaque Rousseu… Moral ideas of self sacrifice and virtue.)
“Theism.” They believed there was a God, but that he’s not involved.
French revolution → Killed the king and queen and all the aristocrats
No matter who wins, it will be tragic → The daughters are married to the opposing side
VERY linear, not painterly
Historical painting (the best)
Storytelling didacticism
The Soldiers are good noble brave stoic heroes
Women are the weak emotional side → Curvy, soft, slumped, pooled

Question 3

Napoleon at the Plague House at Jaffa

Answer 3

Antoine-Jean Gros, 1800

Neoclassicism and romanticism.
Stoic, scientific investigation of the disease
Misty brush strokes, more like romanticism (Romanticism was really interested in organic places)
Islamic
People suffering (less stoic) Napoleon is stoically, rationally, scientifically investigating the wound.
Like Thomas the Apostle (Romantic interest in Christianity)
Idea that a ruler can heal by touching (medieval belief)

Question 4

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Answer 4

Francisco Goya, from Los Caprichos series, etching, 1799

Romanticism, Spain.
Francisco dedicates these to the king in order to not get caught
One interpretation: the man represents reason, and when he sleeps, he has irrational dreams
Another: when reason sleeps in spain, monsters are produced. (Spanish inquisition).

Romanticism loves the gothic, sees it as creepy (instead of light). Loves the foreign, violent, subversive, loves the triumph of nature over science (Frankenstein’s Monster), escapism, foreign lands, the irrational and highly emotional. Is a retaliation against the enlightenment.

Question 5

The Oxbow

Answer 5

Thomas Cole, 1830

Romanticism, America.

Heavily focused on nature
Sublime spectacular landscape
Colored by the idea of manifest destiny (We’re meant to take over the whole continent, and tame the land)
Tree struck by lightning, heavy rain clouds (wild, sublime)
Tamed wilderness on the other side
Religious element: Hebrew letters carved into the hill spells “Noah” (or the name of God upside down)
Respect and fear for nature

Question 6

The Stone Breakers

Answer 6

Gustave Courbet 1850

Cold hard facts
Political commentary ( A Christmas Carol is a Realist work)
Industrial side of the enlightenment
Machine size canvas
Depicts the lowest of the low: stone breakers (make gravel)
Only aristocrats go to the salons where this is shown
Academy hated the boring landscape and awkward position of the boy. Gritty. (Like a snapshot)
The bourgeoisie are not all terrine, they are aware of the poor. There are many charities.
The workers are not paying attention to the viewer. They’re not begging. They don’t care if you’re there. Might remind you of iconoclasm. Remind you of their strength and capacity to revolt against the bourgeoisie

Question 7

Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)

Answer 7

Édouard Manet, 1860

Flaneur
Very avant garde and controversial
Displayed in the 1863 salon because that year they said they were willing to display any submission – they get way too many submissions. So they create a salon de refusé (salon of the refused).
He compares it to drawing a muse/allegorical figure
Scandelous because it’s contemporary france → Reference to prostitution
Everyone is recognizable
The woman is a popular artists’ model
The men are Edouard’s brother and friend
She’s not afraid of the viewer → Confrontational “Why are you so surprised? Don’t pretend this isn’t a part of your life.”
Giant woman in the background?!
Like a rough sketch in oil paint. Not painterly… unfinished.
Intentionally breaking a rule of western art “art should be a window on the world”
That makes this the first modern painting
Challenges the idea that art needs to look like real life
Aesthetically disjointed: like the moral disjointed-ness of paris.

Question 8

Ophelia

Answer 8

John Everett Millais, 1850

Realism
Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood → Young Avant Garde artists that rebel against the academy in England. They choose to study artists that came before the renaissance. They like the romantic subject matter. Like nationalistic subjects, dante, and contemporary Shakespeare. They were brats, and were hated. Called childish and monkish.
Legendary, theatrical
Realistic braken and flowers, and mud and roots, trying to prove that it happened
Victorian england is famously prudish, but they have just as much prostitution as france.
Men can socially recover. Women cannot. Many women drown themselves. They did not allow suicides to be burried in sacret grounds so they were “found drowned” instead.
Victorian flower symbolism
The model for this committed suicide (overdose)

Question 9

Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket

Answer 9

James Abbot McNeill Whistler, 1870

Impressionism: You feel the wind. You smell the poppies. Not political.
Snapshots of bourgeoisie art without commentary (skips over the blood and violence of the time, highly influenced by japanese art). Asymmetrical, oblique perspective. Not real, just beautiful. (Not illusionistic. LINEAR. Not entirely detailed. Aesthetic choice, not realistic colors.)
NOT a window on the world. But not political. An experiment on line and shape that is beautiful.
Titled like a song “nocturne.” Music is about FORM way more than story.
Ruscan called BS. The judge said “how long did you take to paint this?… Two days work? And you charge 200 guinea?” “NO. 200 guineas for the skills I have acquired over a lifetime!” He wins the trial, but the judge has him pay for the trial and he goes bankrupt.

Question 10

Impression: Sunrise

Answer 10

Claude Monet, 1870

Impressionists in france → Socialist, classless exhibitions
Quick impression, fleeting, captured image
Chemically produced pigment (Brighter colors) → Fascination with color
Chevreul’s color theory - Complementary & contrasting colors - The eye blends color (red + blue looks like purple from afar)
Orange on blue. Yellow and orange not fully blended
Worked outside → Then usually bring it inside and rework it
Uses the MOST imposto
Influenced by Japanese art → Focus on landscape
Critic called it “embryonic wallpaper”

Question 11

Paris Street, Rainy Day

Answer 11

Gustave Caillebotte, 1870

Cut off people, poles through people
Capturing the feel of paris in the rain
Feels random
Impressionist, but very linear
Steep street angle (like Japanese art)

Question 12

Improvisation 28

Answer 12

Wassily Kandinsky, 1912

Expressionsim
Sees the war as a necessary cleansing
Titled like music
Sees the war as one of the 4 horsemen of the apocolypse
St George purges the city of the wicked dragon before converting them to christianity
Theosophy philosophy (an agnostic form of belief in human spirituality/divinity)
Tries to prepare people for the end by lifting them to a higher plane
Loves abstract representations like in icons
NOT non-objective! 4 lines over blue = The 4 horsemen
Intended to give a spiritual impression via color
He has synesthesia, and thinks he’s a prophet
A-tonal painting

Question 13

Armored Train in Action

Answer 13

Gino Severini, 1920

Futurism
Frustrated that italy is seen as a museum
Time and space died yesterday, we will glorify war
Fight moralism and feminism and utilitarian cowardice
Bullet train going so fast that there are zoomy lines

Question 14

Fountain

Answer 14

Marcel Duchamp, 1920

He absolutely embraces the bizarre, the crazy, and the very very odd
It’s a urinal that has been turned upsid down - that’s all he’s done to it along with writing a fake name on the side R- Mutt
Marcel Duchamp in the early part of the 20th century had been invited to New York City to be part of the jury for a very Avant Garde art show. Supposedly the parameters of the show were as follows.
Absolutely any work of art will be accepted to the show – no rejections. Marcel Duchamp is the one that makes that rule, and then he secretly submits this under a pseudonym, R. Mutt.
It comes before the jury. Everyone looks at it with a kind of horror, and Marcel Duchamp stands up and says “this is outrageous. We’re not going to accept this in the exhibition.”

Question 15

Two Children Are Threatened by a nightingale

Answer 15

Max Ernst, 1920

Surrealism.
Indebted to cubist collage of found objects
Depiction of something that doesn’t make sense, like a dream
Nightingale who was stabbed
Woman with a butcher knife
Man taking the child about to open the door knob
Action is taking place with figures that look like they’re made out of stone. Are they real? Cause they look fake, so this can’t be real, why am I frightened of them?
Max Earnst had a terror of birds
Looked at his childhood - His pet parrot had died on the day his sister was born.
These two things are now associated in his mind
Diving into his subconscious to try and access his Id. Very personal piece.

Question 16

Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow

Answer 16

Piet Mondrain, 1930

De Stijil
Developed by Piet Mondrian
This movement started representation and then moves to become non-objective
But still profoundly spiritual - Color and shape are conduits to truth
Blue - associates with horizontals (water and land, the flats of the earth)
Yellow - The vertical (sun shines on the land)
Red - the mediating color
THE STYLE - the perfect art should only have red, blue, yellow, black, and white, and no diagonals.
The pinnacle of pure beauty - didn’t think that another type of art would be needed after this because this was the highest art form
Interested in Asian religion - Zen Buddhist art - deep meditative experience

Question 17

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Answer 17

Jackson Pollock, 1950

Abstract Expressionism.
WWII begins with the reparations that germany had to pay for WWI. Adolf Hitler rises to give germans hope. He loved German culture and it’s roots. Fascist. Superior race (like social darwinism)… social ‘cleanse.’ Art collector and iconoclast (hated modern art).
Very modern ideas and art - done for the time of the atom bomb
Did a performance with all the paint splatters
Huge machine sized canvases
Gestural painting or abstract expressionism
The paint itself is communicating emotion

Question 18

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Answer 18

Maya Lin, 1983

Contemporary art.

US deeply concerned about socialism and the USSR → Cold war, gets involved in Vietnam and Korea. Enormous paranoia
MINIMALISM → popular in the 60s and 70s. Back to the basics (basic shapes). Different from cubism. It’s about the whole, not the parts.
Simple shape. Bent triangle in a hill (feels underground)
Shiny and black (like a coffin)
Chronological order of deaths
Polished. Intended to be reflective
Confrontational.
Gut wrenching

Question 19

Q1 Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art was dominated by Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Thoroughly compare and contrast these two movements, considering the impact of politics, philosophy, literature, technology, science, religion, and other cultural issues on the style, subject matter, technique, and mood of the art. The examples you cite should come from FOUR different countries. Be sure to not only demonstrate the differences between Neoclassicism and Romanticism but also ways in which they overlap. Identify all works by title, artist/architect, and date. In the case of buildings, also include location.

Answer 19

Switzerland, France, France, Spain, The US
Politics: Neoclassicism: American revolution, French revolution. Romanticism is subversive.
Philosophy: Neoclassicism wants to inspire restraint and scholarly study as faith in the unseen wanes. Rousseau inspired the revolution, moral ideas of self sacrifice and virtue. Romanticism wants to inspire awe for nature and the things we can’t control. Respect/fear for nature. Manifest destiny.
Literature: Neoclassical works were influenced by the discovery of Pompeii. Frankenstein’s Monster is a popular Romantic work of literature.
Technology: We use it. Vs. But nature is tougher.
Science: Neoclassicism is enlightened, scientific and stoic. Romanticism is more focused on emotions and the irrational.
Religion: Neoclassicism: there is a God, but he’s not very involved. Romanticism: God is sublime.
Cultural issues on style Neoclassicism is linear like the classics. Romanticism is painterly, wild and emotional.
Subject matter Neoclassism focuses on historical paintings. Romanticism focuses on nature, or the foreign/escapist idea.
Technique Linear vs painterly
Mood of the art Centered, structured, clean vs painterly, asymmetrical.

Question 20

Q2
Thoroughly discuss the Realist and Impressionist art movements that developed from the mid to later nineteenth century. How did artists working in both France and England embody notions of modernity and the “avant-garde” in their style AND subject matter (you may also discuss Ilya Repin working in Russia, if you wish)? How did they respond to the political, economic, religious, scientific, and other cultural issues of their day? How does Impressionism both build on Realism and also diverge from it? Identify all works by title, artist, and date.

Answer 20

Political: Realism in France commented on the capacity of the working class to rise up, and the way that the bourgeoisie take advantage of them. In England, Realism was commenting on the prostitution problem.
Economic: Realism in France was soicalist.
Religious: Suicides could not be burried on holy ground. Prostitution was looked down upon.
Scientific: Realism in England… tried to make really accurate plants.
Other cultural issues: Prostitution, window on the world, theatre, whether or not impressionism is art, the useof color…
How does Impressionism build on Realism?
Cold hard facts, feels like a snapshot. Showing you life as it really is. The biggest difference is that impressionism is a-political.
Realism starts to break the window on the world. Impressionism is still a window on the world, but it’s becoming less concerned with accuracy.

Question 21

Q4

The “avant-garde” is at the heart of Modern and Contemporary art, in which style, materials, and even the very definition of art were constantly redefined. Discuss at least FIVE different forms of avant-garde, twentieth-century art, creating a timeline that moves from Expressionist painting, to the abstractions favored by Modernist art critics, to the different, experimental movements in post-World War II Europe and America. In what ways does Contemporary art diverge from Modern art? Explain how politics, philosophy, technology, art theory, and other issues, such as Environmentalism and Feminism, shaped different iterations of the avant-garde.

Answer 21

Expressionism → Concerned with the war. Philosophy of theosophy. A tonal. Saw the war as a necessary evil.
Futurism → Glorified war. Zoom zoom… we have technology. Feminism and ultilitarianism is for the WEAK. Similar to cubism in appearance, but not in objective.
Dada → NONSENSE. Technology is dumb, because we use it to kill people. Ready made art.
Surrealism → PSYCHOLOGY. Uncover the ID. Freud is cool. Inspired by cubism collage of objects.
Da Stijil → Spiritual squares. Simplicity is beautiful. Inspired by Japan. Zen meditation. Superior art form.
Abstract expressionism → Inspired by the atom bomb. The emotion is in the brush strokes.
Contemporary → Confrontational. Minimalism goes back to the basics. Mourning the loss from the war. Uses the land as part of the art.
Contemporary art diverges from modern art in that it is confrontational, it’s very powerful at sending a message by the story it tells or the experience it gives.