IHUM 202 FINAL Flashcards
7 - The secular baroque in the north - the art of observation
–Ptolemy and copernicus
Ptolemy’s geocentric model (earth centered)of the cosmos endured from 100AD to 1523 AD - he thought that all celestial objects (planets, sun, moon, stars) orbited Earth and that earth as center of universe did not move at all
- –replaced by heliocentric model of Copernicus (which had been proposed first by Aristarchus of Samos (310 BC) -all planets orbit sun and moon orbits earth
- -wrong bc sun is not center of universe and it and the stars all move
- -orbits are also not circular, they are elliptical
Jan Vermeer - the geographer (1668-69)
DUTCH VERNACULAR PAINTING STYLE
- –reveals rigorous attention to detailed observation - capture personality of the figure
- -represents domestic interior - a favorite theme in Dutch painting
- -suggests an interest in geography and the practice of understanding the natural world – the geographer in painting looks fwd into the light of revelation
United provinces of Netherlands 1648
- –Amsterdam replaced Antwerp as center of culture and commerce in the north
- -commercial dominance was underscored by the wealth at the city’s disposal during the tulipomania or tulip madness
- –although wealthy and traveled, the Dutch remained conservative and practiced restraint
the calvinist dutch reformed church was questioning doctrine
- –in saving souls could good deeds overcome predestination – those who believed in good works were expelled from Reformed church (tried for treason and beheaded)
- -the doctrinal rigidity of Calvinist Dutch Reformed church is reflected in churches - stripped down of luxurious ornaments = white space meant to reflect purity and propriety of church - whitewashed, bare church
Frances Bacon 1617
Bacon authored Novum Organum Scientarium - new method of science
- –one of most fundamental principles guiding new science was proposition that through DIRECT and CAREFUL observation of natural phenomena one could draw conclusions from particular examples!
- –called INDUCTIVE REASONING - use natural world to predict workings of nature as a whole
let to the EMPIRICAL METHOD (Early version of scientific method) - leading advocate of method was Frances bacon
—he thought greatest obstacle to human understanding was “SUPERSTITION and blind and immoderate zeal of religion”
Rene Descartes
on other hand DESCARTES was advocate of DEDUCTIVE REASONING
- –reasoning where truth of one premise is established, then built on another, etc. to reach a LOGICAL conclusion
- -ex. I think and I possess an idea of God (that idea exists in me and i can be aware of it as on object of my understanding) – this idea leads to other expanded ideas
Descartes’s thinking and deductive reasoning was labeled CARTESIAN
–stressed the distinct separateness of the body and mind known as Cartesian dualism
Johannes Kepler
Theory of the RETINAL IMAGE
- –Kepler had made detailed records of planets movement -
- -he supported Copernicus’s theory (which orig. came from Greek scientist Aristarchus) that planets orbited sun not earth = heliocentric theory
- –Kepler also challenged belief that orbits of planets were spherical — he showed that 5 planets moved around sun in ELLIPTICAL paths
Dutch art - Flowers in a wan-li vase
among most popular paintings of the time were still life paintings – common . household objects and food = VANITAS PAINTINGS (pleasurable simple things in life - spiritual nature of painting doesn’t command our whole attention as before)
—examples of MOMENTO MORI - reminders that we die - displayed in owners home bc both decorative and imbued with moral sensibility
Johannes Goedaert - painted flowers in a vase
Jan Vermeer - painted woman with a pearl necklace
- –she also painted GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING (famous painting)
- -and lady at the virginal with a gentleman
Rembrandt van Rijn - same Dutch time period - 1658
- closer look: painting of anatomy lesson
- –also painted a self-portrait
- –drama of light that pervades his art, he asserted both the psychological complexity of a profoundly indiv. personality an a more general compassion for humanity
- The Baroque Court - absolute power and royal patronage
Absolutism
Absolutism
- -strong, centralized monarchies that exert royal power over the dominions usually on grounds of divine right —monarchs of Euro. at war bc of belief in power of throne
- -ex. Louis XIV King of France
King Louis XIV - project of Palace of Versailles
- -to be unequalled in grandeur, scale, and size - lavishly ornamented
- -Galerie des Glaces - Hall of Mirrors - began in 1678
- -it would be the very image of the King whose majesty “lies the majesty of God”
- -Louis standards brought mix of CLASSICAL ART and decorative ITALIAN BAROQUE
- –Louis promoted the classical architecture with Baroque dramatic effects – creating a new style that is a contradiction —> the CLASSICAL BAROQUE
- –diff. tastes in art competed for the favor of King Louis XIV of France
Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens
political conflict affected arts in England
Rubens - painted the arrival and reception of Maria de Medici at Marseilles
- –Rubens focused on expressive capabilites of paint – representing Baroque decorative expressionism
- -addressed the SENSES
Poussin - Shepherds of Arcadia
- –painted with classical restraint
- -focused on the connection of the picture to a classical narrative tradition
- -addressed the INTELLECT
created two schools of thought = RUBENISTES and POUSSINISTE
Comedie Francaise
- -built under charter granted by Louis
- -French national theater
- -Moliere’s comedies (Tartuffe) spared no one from ridicule
- -Jean Racine wrote tragedies - became first French playwright to live entirely on earnings from his plays
1566-1625 - monarchs and history
- —–“The first Stuart monarch, James I (1566-1625), succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in 1603
- –His son, Charles I (1600-1649)” lost throne to Puritan-led uprising led by Oliver Cromwell
- —Puritans had objected to Charles marrying a Catholic
- –After Cromwell’s death, a newly formed Parliament asked Charles II, the exiled son of Charles I, to return and assume throne
- —then came James II - who appoints Roman Catholics to top military positions
- –1688, William of Orange invited to invade Britain by the Puritans—rule by the DIVINE RIGHT of kings in Britain is permanently suspended and a CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY established
Anthony Van Dyck
Van Dyck
- –CAVELIER - royalist influenced
- -ROUNDHEADS = puritan influence
- -painted portrait of Charles I hunting
- -Portrait of Alexander Henderson
Anonymous American - painted portrait of Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary
—the mild ostentation of colonial painting in America reflects the rewards of so-called “Protestant work ethic”
Spanish paintings 1656
arts played significant role in the Spanish court
–and native Am. traditions affected Baroque style in Americas
- -even as the Spanish throne seemed to crumble the arts flourished under the patronage of a court that recklessly indulged itself
- -17th century spanish arts and letters led to calling the era the SPANISH GOLDEN AGE
then by start of 17th century Lima, Peru become fully Baroque city
- –native painters decorated their buildings of saints with BROCATEADO (application of gold leaf to canvas)
- -Baroque found particular expression in the RETABLOS (or altarpiece ensembles) in the churches of New Spain
- -After Pueblo revolt of 1680 - the church became more tolerant of Native traditions
painting by Luis Nino - our lady of the Victory of . Malaga —souther Cuzco school in Bolivia
the Viceroyalty of New Spain all throughout Mexico, lower part of U.S. (Tucson, AZ), Dominican Republic, puerto rico and Cuba
- rise of Enlightenment in England
- –the claims of reason
Absolutism v. Liberalism
THOMAS HOBBES
- -firm believer of monarch’s ABSOLUTISM
- –believe most humans recognize their own essential depravity and therefore willingly submit to governance
- –they accept the SOCIAL CONTRACT - giving up sovereignty over themselves and bestowing it on a ruler
- -they carry out ruler’s demands and the ruler in return keeps the peace
JOHN LOCKE
- -believed in LIBERALISM
- -argued ppl are capable of governing themselves
- -TABULA RASA (blank slate) - human mind at birth is blank slate and our env. (what we learn and how we learn it) fills this state
- -separation of powers
Paradise Lost
John Milton
- -published this epic poem 1667
- -possibilities of liberty and justice
- -in many ways, God assumes position of royal authority that Hobbes argues for in his Leviathan
- –like Locke, Lucifer thinks of himself and the other angels as “by nature free, equal and independent”
- -the issues that separate God from Satan are clearly the issues dividing England in 17th century - tension btwn absolute rule and civil liberty of the indiv.
other Enlightenment developments in England 1700s
- SATIRE – in art and literature
- –William Hogarth (art prints)
- -Jonathan SWIFT!! (literature like A Modest Proposal) - Isaac Newton and his PRINCIPIA published 1687 – appeals to the supremacy of REASON
- the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION – invention of useful manufacturing devices that propel England to forefront of international trade
- The NOVEL emerges in England
- -Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
- -Samuel Richardson (Pamela)
- -Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) - Captain Cook explores Pacific ocean (Hawaii, Tahiti, Easter island)
- The Rococo and the Enlightenment on the Continent
The Rococo Style
- -combining art and architecture
- -began with Michelangelo through Mannerism and Baroque into 18th century (paintings on ceilings)
- –became increasingly elaborate
- -architectural interiors creating S and C curves, shell, wing, scroll, and plant tendril forms, rounded convex
- -often asymmetrical surfaces surrounded by elaborate frames called CARTOUCHES
the ROCOCO style applied to French painting
- -compositions usually asymmetrical and color range was light, emphasizing gold, silver and pastels
- -called the Fete Galante painters
- -Madame de Pompadour by Francouis Boucher 1756 – painted fancy woman w/ book
Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci Palace and Gardens (Prussia)
gardens suggested a growing awareness of the need to acknowledge or balance the conflicting claims of order reason and intellect with those of the senses, pleasure and imagination
–can be called useful and practical but also aesthetic or beautiful
Philosophes 1700s
Most philosophes were DEISTS
- -accepted idea that God created the universe but did not believe he had much to do w/ its day-to-day workings
- -universe went daily by NATURAL LAW - from nature and human society
- -so humans had to TAKE CONTROL OF THEIR OWN DESTINIES
Denis Diderot - Encyclopedia
–Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Emilie and the Social Contract
Rousseau
believed in the natural goodness of humankind - goodness corrupted by society and the growth of civilization
- -virtues like unselfishness and kindness were inherent
- -this belief gives rise to NOVLE SAVAGE - he strongly believe d that a new social order was req. to foster them
- -wrote The Social Contract - the ideal state by the “general will” of ppl delegating authority to gov.
- -“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”
classical orchestra of enlightenment era
CLASSICAL SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA
- –first in Vienna 1760 - represents an almost total rejection of values associated with the Rococo and Baroque
- -classical style bc it shares w/ greek and roman art the essential features of symmetry, proportion, balance, formal unity, and clarity
- -most popular among middle class
- –Mozart and Haydn
- -Johann Stamitz in Germany
Standard musical notation (notes on paper) formed
–diagram of formations of classical symphonic orchestra
SYMPHONIC FORM
- -Stamitz made FOUR MOVEMENT FORM popular
1. first movement played in fast temp (allegro)
2. slow and reflective (Adagio or andante)
3. picks up pace again - rhythms of minuet
4. allegro again - spirited and lively
HAYDN - created STRING QUARTETS
- -four string instruments (two violins, a viola and a cello)
- -performed in private settings - salons, small audiences
- The rights of man - revolution and the neoclassical style
America 1763 - 13 colonies
—Paul Revere - the bloody massacre
two revolutions
- -idea of human freedom was fundamental to the ENLIGHTENMENT
- -two of its greatest expressions in DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776)
- –and 2. Declaration of the rights of man and citizen - published by National Assembly Aug. 1789
two revolutions
- -Jefferson’s argument that Am. colonies should be self-governing was preceded by British taxation of colonies
- -in France - national debt and taxes associated w/ paying it produced events leading to revolution
Jacobin hero - member of radical minority of France’s National Assembly who favored elimination of monarchy and institution of egalitarian democracy
—fiery editor of The Friend of the PPL - Jean-Paul Marat who was assassinated in his bath (Marat)
the rights of women - enlightenment era
Olympe de Gouges was one of the early voices for women’s rights in France during French revolution
- –she was beheaded during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror 1793
- -wrote Declaration from the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
Mary Wollstonecraft
- -English writer and activist responding to French Revolution from abroad
- –wrote vindication of the rights of woman
US revolution
- –founders of newly created US of America modeled new republic as a NEOCLASSICAL society
- -stable, balanced, and rational culture that would imitate idealized view of Rome and Athens
Euro. and America both needed a respite from the political and social chaos of the period
- -in Paris - NEOCLASSICISM supplanted the ornate, decorative and dissolute styles of Baroque and Rococo (styles that had been the hallmark of monarchical taste)
- –this neoclassical style was direct expression of democracy itself
- -Thomas Jeffersons home in Virginia with Wedgwood reliefs decorating mantel
Jacques-Louis David and Neoclassicism in France
- –the MAJOR French painter of the day – “pre-revolutionary Paris”
- -David abandoned the traditional complexities of composition that had defined French academic history painting…and substituted a formal balance and simplicity that is fully neoclassical
painted the Oath of Horatii
–and David’s the Lictors returning to Brutus the bodies of his sons
another artist was Angelica Kauffmann – Cornelia pointing to her children as her treasures
–signed on based of column at right
Napoleonic Europe
Empire of France 1807
—over French, Belgium
French satellites
–Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany
allied with France
–Norway, Austria
Jacques-Louis David also painted Napoleon crossing the Saint-Bernard Pass 1800 (on a horse)
the slave trade triangle
the issue of slavery undermined the idealism of the era
North America sends tobacco, cotton, sugar, molasses to Europe
- -Europe sends manufactured goods to Africa
- -Africa sends slaves to Brazil and west indies and america
- –west indies send cotton and sugar also
several writers tried to fight practice of slavery in the New World
British slave ship - “Brookes” under the regulated slave trade
William Blake paints a Negro Hung alive by the ribs to a gallows
- The Romantic world view
- –self in nature and nature in self
there was a growing taste for the natural world in the late 18th century and first half of 19th century
- -in England and Germany and America
- -“Romantic England”
TRANSCENDENTALISTS
- -sought to discover “transcendent” order of nature
- -unifying principles could be found in the natural world - which became a sacred space that pointed to the immanent presence of the divine
the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque
Romanticism and the Sublime
The SUBLIME
- –the prospect of anything beyond the ability of the mind to comprehend it fully
- -also the simultaneous feeling of fear and awe by the grandeur of nature or the universe
Caspar David Friedrich - famous romantic artist at time
–paintings are darker, gloomy, watercolor
Wiliam Blake
- –poet, engraver, watercolorist, and printmaker
- -colored engravings were created as visuals to accompany his books of mythological poetry
- -his most famous poetry books: songs of innocence and experience and Europe: a prophesy
- -Catherine Boucher - Blake’s wife - aided him as an engraver and painter
- –his themes were mythological and epic - fantastical
other romantic writers in europe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- –wrote The sorrows of young Werter 1774
- -Faust 1832
Mary Shelley
- -daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft - famous early feminist writer - died 12 days after Mary’s birth
- –father was William Godwin - famous political writer
- -wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818
- -met and ran away with husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814 (16 or 17)
- -came home to England 1814 and face social criticism and shame - pregnant
- -first child was premature and died quickly
- -while in Switzerland she writes Frankenstein - published anonymously in 1818 and 1823 with her full name
- -had 4 children but only one son lived
Origins of Frankenstein
- -1816 visit to Lake Geneva, Switzerland with husband poet Percy and two other poets
- -Byron (famous poet of time) suggested they each write a ghost story to share with the others
- –she was trying to figure out a good story then has a dream
- -“wanted a story to rival others shared” - speak to mysterious fears of nature and awaken thrilling horror
- -saw a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside thing he had put together – frightful for any human endeavor to mock mechanism of Creator of the world
themes of Frankenstein
- personal ambition and science can be highly and dangerously hubristic
- we must take responsibility for things we create - nurture, protect and educate them
- we are born as a blank slate - TABULA RASA - on which society later writes its inscriptions
- the repressed past will always return to haunt us in horrific and persistent forms
- nature does not grant us beauty - we have power to bestow the title of beauty on that which nature has created
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
called “Walden, Life in the Woods”
- -romantic sensibilities also led to “contemplation of eternal things”
- -American writers of Romantic sensibility (like Emerson and Thoreau) shared w/ painters like Church a wonder at the natural world which they felt an ecstatic communion
- -shaped by the nation’s emphasis on individualism and indiv. liberty
- -discover the self in nature
- Industry and the Working class and photography
Industrialization
industrialization
- -created wealth for a few but left the vast majority of men and women living bleak and unhealthy lives
- –long hours for low wages in env. f smoke and soot
- –single women inc. entered workplace and married women were driven out - leaving men as sole breadwinners for family
- -industrialization shaped the urban env. in 19th century
London grew dramatically from end of 18th century - to 1830s - to 1870s almost entirely populated
Charles Dickens as literary realist/reformer
Literary REALISM
—depiction of contemporary life emphasizing fidelity to everyday experience and the facts and conditions of everyday life
Charles Dickens
- -victim of harsh home and working conditions in his youth
- -wrote Hard Times 1854 and used talent to protest unfair gaps btwn rich and poor
Henri Balzac (The Human Comedy) and Gustav Flaubert (Madame Bovary) did similar work in France
reformed reaction to industrialization
J.M.W. Turner
Turner’s work thinks deeply about effects of modernity
–railroad painting - diff. btwn pre-industrial and contemporary industrial life
Photogenic drawing
a process for fixing negative images on paper coated w/ light-sensitive chemicals
- -developed by WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT in 1839
- -his painting “the open door”
Daguerrotype
a photographic process developed in 1839 that yielded a positive image on a polished metal plate
- -named after one of its two inventors: Louis-Jacque-Mande Daguerre
- –“from now on, painting is dead!”
Darwin and Natural selection
Published THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES in 1859
- –natural selection and the concept of the “survival of the fittest”
- -these ideas created an uproar!
- Global confrontation and civil war
- –challenges to cultural identity
by middle of 19th century - living conditions in Paris and Europe had become intolerable
- -1848 - workers revolted w/ battle cry “the right to work”
- -Bourgeois middle class was convinces that it had barely survived collapse of social order
- -elected Charles-Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte who improved conditions and cracked down on revolutionary impulses and possibilities
Marxism
Karl Marx - met Friedrich Engels in Paris cafe 1844 - time when sentiment of pop. was moving against owners of production and capital (bourgeoisie)
- -MARX AND ENGELS went on to publish COMMUNIST MANIFESTO 1848
- -predicted certain events in Comm. manifesto
—“proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. they have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE
Bourgeoisie v. Proletariat Revolution
- -resolution lay in synthesis of classless society - utopian society at end of history
- -since dialectic forces that drive history would by then have to finally and permanently be resolved
Les Mis — Victor Hugo wrote novel and later became musical
- -about a failed 1832 uprising
- -leading up to 1848 Paris revolution
Alfred Stevens and Haussmannization
Alfred Stevens
–painting chronicling the injustices of Napoleon III’s crackdown on the poor and vagrant during the Haussmannization of Paris
Haussmannization 1870
- -term used to describe baron Haussmann’s approach to urban redevelopment including mass destruction of working-class neighborhoods
- -beautified city and multiplied number of public green spaces/parks
- -widened the streets (thus inhibiting the use of barricades by revolutionaries) and disenfranchised the working class by destroying their urban neighborhoods
effects of race, slavery and the American Civil War
- -artists painted work that depicted an ambiguity about slave life int he south
- -Am. civil war in 1861 until 1865
- -reconstruction follows and Union troops occupy south until 1877
- -constitution amended TWICE to provide more rights to Af. Am. post civil war – BUT rights later repealed by Jim Crow laws in the south - “slavery by another name”
Japonisme
U.S. admiral Perry’s arrival in Japan 1854 ends Japan’s isolation
- -opening of Japan clears way for trade and large artistic influence
- -Japan exhibits U.S. Centennial Exposition and influences American artists
- -moves U.S. artists away from perspectival painting and toward two dimensional relationships with shapes and colors and canvas
Fenellosa
- -proponent of Japonisme who lived many years in Japan and converted to Buddhism
- -educated Americans about beauty of Jap. culture and art
Japonisme’s influence: whistler
imperialism
policy or ideology of extending a country’s rule over foreign nations, often by military force or by gaining political and economic control of other areas
- –normal and common worldwide throughout recorded history
- -Napoleon
- In pursuit of modernity
- -Paris in 1850s and 60s
key developments of mid-19th century
- Charles Darwin writes the origin of species
- Marx and Engels write Comm. manifesto 1848
- American Civil war changes scope and scale of war
- Euro. nations inc. imperialist ventures in Asia and Africa
- Matthew Perry pulls Japan out of isolation in 1853
- -begins exchange of artistic ideas btwn East and West called JAPONISME
Camille Pissarro artist and changing Paris
avenue de opera - painting of opera house in paris
- -boulevards on par excellence the social centre of Paris
- –aristocrat comes to lounge - stranger to gaze - luxurious trading
- -grand boulevards of Paris
painting street of paris - citizens and tourists enjoyed miles of new sidewalks with over 100,000 trees planted beside them
–8 new bridges across Seine river and pathways and roads along its banks further expanded scenic vistas of city’s architectural treasures
Thomas Couture - portrait George sand 1859
he painted a portrait of - George sand, which was the pen name of Aurore Lucille Dupin
—wrote a novel that was “a moral allegory of the impossible position of women in the mid-19th century French culture
Couture also painted Romans during the decadence of the empire
Bourgeois definition
- –characteristic of middle class
- -perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes - rich, bored, families
- -uphold interests of capitalism, not communist
- -took for granted the sanctity of property
Baudelaire, Manet, the Flaneur, and modernism
Charles Baudelaire - poet
- -salon of 1846 - ironic plea to bourgeoisie to value art - but was certain they would ignore him
- -BAUDELAIR INITIATED MODERNISM
- –in his poems he sought to shock ppl - with imagery that was exotic sexuality to grim reality of death
- -Baudelaire called for an artist gifted with ACTIVE IMAGINATION to pursue a new artistic goal - describing the modern city and its culture
- –Edouard MANET embodied his new vision
- -both Baudelaire and Manet were FLANEURS!!!!!!!!
Flaneur
- –many about town - with no apparent occupation - strolling city, studying and experiencing it coolly and dispassionately
- -fashionable dress - flaneur had acute ability to understand subtleties of modern life and ability to create art
manet seemed to offer up his own judgment of PARIS as a critique of BOURGEOIS VALUES in his art
–painted luncheon on grass
Emile Zola - 1868 - portrait of him painted by Manet
Zola was a naturalist novelist - who defended Manet’s art during scandal over his piece Olympia
- -Zola practiced brand of literary realism called NATURALISM
- -Naturalism - nature seen through temperament
- -diff. from realism bc does not pretend to objective reporting
- -he was aware that the artist’s own personality definitely influenced the work and his view of the world
nationalist
music - new directions in opera developed mid 19th century
- -nationalist tendencies of era played themselves out in Paris Opera house
- –Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto and other works symbolized Italian nationalism
- –Leitmotif - in opera was a brief musical idea connected to a character event - or idea that recurs throughout the work
another Opera writer was Richard Wagner
–wrote Gotterdammerung (Siegfried’s death and funeral march)
- The promise of renewal
- -hope and possibility in late 19th century Europe
renovation of Paris 1870 ended when
Renovation of Paris temp. halted in 1870 when Louis-Napoleon entered into war with Prussia
- -defeated by Otto Von Bismarck and exiled to England
- -Paris Commune forms in 1871 - intent to run Paris separately from rest of country
- –Communards are slaughtered by army of national assembly - 20k-25k Parisians die
French impressionism
French Impressionists grew out of need for hope and renewal in France in wake of many tragedies
—movement looked to Manet as its leader…but its principal artists were Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, and most famously Claude Monet!!!
some critics saw impressionism as deliberate response to realistic accuracy of the photograph (Developed 1839) - as rather than seeking to create reality, these artists blurred images and sought to capture personal impressions
impressionist artists claimed to prefer EN PLEIN AIR (painting in open air - outside)
–made possible bc paint in metal tubes was intro. in 1841
The natural effects of light most interested young painters - depicted using new synthetic pigments of bright, transparent colors
French Painter Morisot
Edgar Degas
BERTHE MORISOT
Summer’s day painting 1879
–“vaporous and barely drawn lines” - shuns outline altogether - quick strokes
EDGAR DEGAS
- -painted a lot of ballerinas
- -Degas used pastels (powdered pigment) to allow him to simulate a gaslit atmosphere of cafe in painting
Russian realism and “Soul”
Russia - Francophiles followed developments in Paris carefully
- -but Slavophiles rejected pro-Western bias and those Westernizers who believed that Russia was hopelessly mired in the medieval past
- -SLAVOPHILES were nationalists who saw Russian culture and its “soul” or spirituality as being diff. from west
Russian nationalism was reflected in literature, art, and music
Slavophiles artists
- -Dostoyevsky
- -Tolstoy
- -Tchaikovsky
Joseph Paxton - crystal palace, London
effort to help British public understand necessity for “harmony, beauty, and utility” in public buildings and design of industrial age in Britain
- -tried to demonstrate lack of standards in British design
- -he proposed Exhibition of Art and Industry of all Nations in London - held in 1851
- -event was held in architectural marvel, The Crystal Palace, London
- -interior was glass ceiling
Crystal Palce and pre-Raphaelite artists expressed spirit of social reform
Morris and the company
Wiliam Morris founded design firm Morris and Company 1855
- -modeled on medieval trade guilds
- -comp. made tapestries and ceramic tiles, stained glass, furniture = all handcrafted
- -Morris worked with Rossetti and Burne-Jones (tapestries) - all PRE-RAPHAELITE ARTISTS
- -their work sought to fight against alienation of labor caused by industrial-era factories and mass production
- Fin de Siecle
- -toward the Modern
Exposition Universelle
Exposition Universelle opened in Paris spring 1889
- -began a new era of Western Tech. innovation and political and social superiority as displayed in the fair’s thousands of exhibits
- -also held Edison’s electric light
Art Noveau
Art Noveau = New art
- -pioneered by Siegfried Bing — associated with a number of contemporary trends
- -Arts and crafts movement in England to Symbolism - which elevated feelings, imagination and power of dreams as creative inspiration
are nouveau was transitional style - btwn fin de siecle decadence and innovations of modernity
Henrik Ibsen in Norway
Ibsen - revealed the lies behind the seemingly upright facade of contemporary Euro. society
—famous play = A DOLL’S HOUSE
transition from realism to symbolism
Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec
notable in expressive sculptures of AUGUSTE RODIN
- -his style matured in years after 1877
- -Rodin depended on the play of light upon surfaces for the energy of his works (just like impressionist artists)
- -his sculpture - The Kiss 1888
TOULOUSE-LAUTREC
- –hard to categorize
- -he influenced the art nouveau movement with his posters and lithographs
- -he also influenced the symbolists
- –his art is simultaneously realistic and symbolic
post-impressionist painting
rather than creating impressionist works captured the optical effects of light and atmosphere and the fleeting qualities of sensory experience, they sought to capture something transcendent in their act of vision, something that captured the essence of their subject”
post-impressionist artists
- –Seurat
- –Van Gogh
- –Cezanne
Georges Seurat - a sunday on la grande jatte 1884
–painting shows Seurat’s practice of POINTILISM and the color theories of Chevreul and Rood
Van Gogh
- –IMPASTO style (dashes of thickly painted color) and the use of color and warped perspective as symbolic elements
- -starry night - night cafe
Paul Cezanne
—tension btwn spatial perspectives and surface flatness - become one of the chief preoccupations of modern painting in the forthcoming century
Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
- –argued that all great works of art must contain both Apollonian and Dionysian elements
- -tension btwn rationality and the appeal to the chaos of senses
- –Enlightenment developments in science and philosophy promoted reason and rationality - Nietzsche argues that an overemphasis on the Apollonian leaves us detached from wisdom provided by chaos, emotion and suffering
Ancient Greek theater featured perfect balance of Apollonian (reason) and Dionysian (emotion)
–appeal to reason effectively eliminated Apollonian-Dionysian balance - Socrates/plato killed tragedy
Theory of tension that creates art
Apollonian characteristics
- -apollo is agent of clarity and order - sharp light of reason
- -he governs the realm of appearances (including dreams and use of images to make sense of things)
- -believes world can be observed and measured - predictable
- -manifested best by “plastic arts - classical sculpture)
- -captures ideal form through illusion
- -stresses primacy of the indiv.
Dionysian characteristics
- -Dionysus by contrast was God of intoxication - associated with dark, chaotic energies
- -believes world is chaotic and defies measurement or understanding
- -manifested best by music, which has no “ideal form” to emulate
- -stresses that division btwn our bodies and rest of universe is only an illusion
Edvard Munch
From Gauguin - he took a sensuous curvilinear patterning of color and form
–from Van Gogh he took the dutch artist’s intense brushwork and color - also his disorienting perspective
Munch’s depiction of horrifying anxiety of modern life is unmatched in work of any previous painter
- The era of invention
- –Paris and the modern world
Pablo Picasso
Picasso 1907
- -attempt to capture multiple angles/points of view from a single viewing point
- -one of the reasons why the figures in the painting appear contorted or at strange angles
- –Picasso’s subject matter and ambiguous space were disturbing for viewers - Les Demoiselles was an act of liberation - an exorcism of past traditions
- -Picasso and Matisse were rivals
FAUVISM - known for its radical application of arbitrary, or unnatural color (some in Vn Gogh’s paintings)
George Braque
Georges Braque
- CUBISM - art style developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque - noted for the geometry of its forms, its fragmentation of the object and its inc. abstraction
- -Picasso - cubism in houses on the hill
Picasso and Braque began to decompose their subjects into faceted planes so they seem to emerge down the middle fo the canvas from some angular maze
–questioning the very nature of reality
Futurism
- -futurists repudiated static art and sought to render what they thought of as the defining characteristic of modern urban life-speed
- -reflecs same anti-traditional feelings that motivated Picasso’s les demoiselles - same distaste for bourgeoisie seemingly secure in its complacency
- –futurism rejected the political ad artistic traditions of the past - called for new art
modernism
in painting and sculpture - refers to a wide range of practices including abstraction, distortion, anti-naturalism
- -departs from naturalism and the illusionism that defined academic art of late 19th century
- -modernism began in France among artists working outside academics
- –affected by modernity and tech. changes - bc tech. brought a new way of seeing the world, which made world appear abstract
- -IMP! modernism was across ALL ARTS - literature, film, music, dance (not just painting and sculpture)
the armory show of 1913
- –organized by association of American painters and sculptors
- -exhibition of euro. art - major influence to American art later
- -historical works that led to modernism (impressionists and post-impressionists) as well as cutting-edge (avant-garde) works by Euro. and american artists
- –HUGE cultural impact
showed Marcel Duchamp’s painting called nude descending a staircase — in place of the human form divine is a series of overlapping planes, reduced to underlying geometries
New York Dada and the “Readymade”
NY Dada - launched by French artists fleeing WWI - employed irony and humor to subvert high-minded aesthetic attitudes and mocked American’s obsession with tech.
—first transatlantic art movement - brought together Euro. and American artists
Marcel Duchamp again with sculpture called “Fountain” - which was a urinal
- -he used his found objects to unsettle received wisdom (a urinal is not a work of art)
- -his work reflected critically on the historical assumptions behind much of art’s history
conservative reactions to modernism
- –saw modernist art as insanity, communist conspiracy, criminality, or bad eyesight
- –critics linked abstraction, expressionism, and other modernist forms to dangerous foreign influences undermining traditional values of the nation
- –called it “Ellis island art” – to associate it with immigrants (mainly Russian Jews fleeing persecution)
Music and dance during modernist time
Composer Igor STRAVINSKY and the Ballets Russes of Impresario Sergei Diaghilev shocked Paris with performance of le sacre du printemps (rite of spring) - 1913
Atonality v. Romantic lyricism
(Schoenberg v. Puccini)
—Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg dispensed with traditional tonality - harmonic basis of Western music and created atonal works
–Giacomo Puccini - composed contemporary lyrical compositions of operas who were w/o parallel for the beauty of their melodies
The camera obscura 1877
and proto-cinematics
Proto-cinematics 1877
—first mentiosn of the camera obscura date back to 5th century BCE and show up in writings of Aristotle and others
Projection of an image of the new royal Palace in Prague Castle created with a camera obscura
the magic lantern
–light source for the magic lantern varied over years - from candles and oil lamps to limelight (flame illuminating a stick of calcium oxide) to electric arc lamps (tech. later used for motion-picture projectors)
Eadweard Muybridge
- –photographer, murderer and motion-picture pioneer
- -developed animal-locomotion serial photographs - created moving pictures
zoopraxiscope - 1879
Thomas edison and William K. Dickson
- -invented the Kinetograph and kinetoscope 1891
- -which were forerunners of the motion picture film projector
- -piece of film passed rapidly between a lens and an electric bulb while the viewer peeped through hole
first cinema screenings - 1895
Lumiere Brothers - 1895
- -worked on improving Edison’s Kinetograph
- -led to the cinemotographe as a camera and a projector
first shots Mar. 1895 in Paris
–first public screening Dec. 1895 in Paris
- The great war and its impact
- – a lost generation and a new imagination
Beginning
- -June 28, 1914 - young Bosnian nationalist assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand (heir to Austrian throne) in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo
- -with Germ. support, Austria declared war on Serbia and Russia rushed to Serbia’s defense
- -France supported its ally Russia – Germany invaded Luxembourg and Belgium and then pushed into France
- -Aug. 4 Britain declared war on Germany and Euro. was consumed in battle
by end - 10 million casualties
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Kirchner was a driver in the artillery and experience overwhelmed him
- -while recuperating in Germ. he painted himself in the uniform of Artillery regiment, cigarette from mouth, his eyes flat and empty, his right hand a bloody handless stump
- -he was never literally wounded in reality but the painting is a metaphorical expression of his fears - his sense of creative and sexual impotence in the aftermath of war
Alliances of war
Allied powers
–France, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Britain
Central powers
- -Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Ottoman empire
- -central powers had also occupied Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Serbia
Switzerland, Albania, and Netherlands were neutral
great war’s toll
by war’s end, casualties = 10 million
- -many prev. discussed artists and writers died in war
- –the art and literature of the period reflect an inc. sense of the absurdity of modern life, the fragmentation of experience and the futility of even daring to hope
Dada
Dada was an international signifier of negation
- -did not mean anything - just as in face of war life itself seemed to have become meaningless
- -Romanian poet Trstian Tzara was its creator/spokesperson
- -Hans Jean Arp – Fleur Manteau (flower hammer)
KASIMIR MALEVICH was huge! - the last futurist exhibition of painting - 1915
painting with white, then big black square and tilted smaller red square
- —nothing is real except feeling — the square = feeling, the white field the void beyond this feeling
- –represents “the zero degree” - the irreducible core of painting
- -Malevich - painterly realism. Boy with Knapsack – he shows that these apparently static forms (two squares set on a rectangle) are energized in a dynamic tension
El Lissitsky
also a futurist, dada painter
- –her lithograph refers to conflict btwn Bolshevik “reds” and “white” Russians who opposed Lenin’s party
- -the wedge is symbolically male, forceful and aggressive as opposed to the passive (womblike) white circle - which the male wedge penetrates both literally and figuratively from the left
- -design is in the service of social change
Cubism by:
Braque and Picasso
—painted fragmented world cubism
The Kuleshov effect
a shot (photo) has two values
- that which it possesses in itself
- that which it acquires when placed in a relationship with another image
showed three pictures of a man’s face - same picture
- next to a coffin = represents sadness
- next to a bowl of soup = hunger
- next to a woman on a bed = lust
Sigmund Freud
growing out of theories of Freud and Jung regarding nature of the unconscious and the significance of dreams
—surrealism sought to tap into those sources through art
SURREALISM defined
- -pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express (verbally or in writing) the true function of thought
- -it dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations
use the ICEBERG diagram to visually describe Freud’s understanding of the human mind
- -above water = conscious… which is thoughts and perceptions
- -surface water = preconscious level – memories, stored knowledge, fears, doubts
- -lowest level = unconscious level – hug7y motives, aggression, socially unacceptable desires
writers after the war
After WWI, writers struggled to find a way to express themselves authentically in lang. that the war had seemed to have left impoverished
—the life of the unconscious was the subject of the stream of consciousness novel that rose to prominence in the same era, including James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”
Although not a stream-of consciousness writer, ERNEST HEMINGWAY - also in Paris around this time - grew as a writer during this period
–period of his life called A MOVEABLE FEAST
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS STYLE OF WRITING
- NY, skyscraper culture, and the Jazz Age
The Great Migration
the great migration
- -1914 - nearly 90% of Af. American’s lived in south
- -but lured by huge demand for labor in N once WWI began and impoverished after boil weevil infestation ruined the cotton crop, blacks flooded the north
- -in 90 days in early 1920s, 12,000 Af. Am. left Mississippi
- -anything seemed better than Jim Crow in south - hoped to find a new life in urban north
W.E.B. Du Bois
–Roots of Harlem Renaissance
W.E.B. Du Bois
- -black historical and sociologist
- -philosophical roots of Harlem Renaissance
- -1903 - in his book the Souls of Black Folk , he proposed that the identity of Af. Am. was fraught with ambiguity and a double-consciousness
Harlem Renaissance
- -double-consciousness defining Af. Am. identity
- -Harlem was center of AVANT-GARDE destined to rehabilitate Af. Am. from position of spiritual and fin. impoverishment
- -publications like Survey Graphic and The New Negro featured works of Af. Am. writers and jazz
Louis Armstrong and jazz
Blue notes - slightly lower or flatter than conventional pitches
- -in jazz, blue instrumentalists or dingers “bend” or “scoop” a blue note
- –such effects first established in the blues proper, form of song that originated among enslaved black Americans and their descendants
Aaron Douglas
Douglas - “The Prodigal Son” painting
–his 2D silhouetted figures would become signature style of Harlem Renaissance art - where a sense of rhythmic movement and sound is created by abrupt shifts in the directions of lines and mass
Jacob Lawrence also
- -both Douglas and Lawrence make clear the connectedness of literature, music, and visual image in Af. Am. experience
- -Af. Am. artists
NYC Skyscrapers
the skyscraper became a symbol of American ingenuity, prosperity and power
- –uniquely American in origin, their influence would spread around the world
- -skyscrapers proved to be the hallmark of modernity in 1920s - also characterized by many tech.
Alfred Stieglitz
Stieglitz valued both artists (Matisse and Picasso) for the attention they paid to formal composition over and above any slavery dependence on visual appearance
–he valued in other words conceptual qualities in their work as opposed to their imagery
the international style in architecture
1920s were period of unprecedented growth in NYC
–NY building boom of 1920s dominated highly ornamented and decorated architecture was countered by the INTERNATIONAL STYLE
principles of new international style were related to the machines they also admired; pure forms w/o arbitrary applied ornament - with severe, flat surfaces in its place
—Frank Lloyd Wright’s house = prairie style
“Hollywoodland” sign – 1923 - large number of immigrants migrated out of NY where many had worked in garment industry - moved to CA where they founded the motion picture industry in Hollywood
- -studio system they developed dominated filmmaking worldwide
- -mostly 2nd generation Am. Jews that left
- –silent film’s GOLDEN AGE
- the age of anxiety
- –Fascism and depression, Holocaust and Bomb
Berlin 1920s and Hitler
Berlin was Germany’s largest city
—it was the center not only of German cultural and intellectual life, but also that of Eastern Euro. - city to which artists and writers were drawn bc of its liberalism and collapse of traditional values
Berlin 1920s
economic inflation - worthless paper money printing - several cycles through multiple gov. - perceived lack of traditional morals - and communist influences left Germ. vulnerable to an extreme FASCIST faction known as the National Socialist Party (NAZIS)
—Hitler also was able to scapegoat Jews - and other ppl not considered “worthy” of Aryan associations - blamed them for many of Germany’s problems
–anti-semitism and anti-communism
Kathe Kollwitz
Kollwitz
- –work before WWI was highly naturalist portrayals of german poor - images of grief, suffering, and doom
- -now post WWI she turned to dramatic media of woodblock and lithograph
- -lithographs - she used to make broadly distributed posters with messages like “Never again war!”
- -she was able to achieve a gestural freedom as powerful and strident as her woodblocks
the Dutch De Stijl movement
Nazi party forced the Bauhaus, the leading exponent of modernist art and architecture in Germany inspired by the Dutch de Stijl movement, to close down
MONDRIAN was leader of the De Stijl movement in Holland
- -also Theo van Doesburg
- -“purely plastic works of art” of total abstraction
- -the De Stiijl movement rejected literal reality as experienced by the senses - instead reduced creative terms to the bare minimum, the straight line, the right angle, the three primary colors (red, yellow blue) and the three basic noncolors (black, gray and white)
Le Corbusier
the new architecture Barr and Johnson labeled the international style in the same 1932 exhibition at the museum of modern art in NY where they included work of Frank Lloyd Wright
–shows work of Le Corbusier and 2 Bauhaus architects
social realism art
with the art of social realism - the Soviets were deliberately pushed away from abstract art of the early Revolution era and toward more realistic subjects that the masses could understand
—the sin of Soviet artists during period was to be “too formalist” - more interested in exploring form, shape, and color than communist ideologies
Pablo Picasso 2
- -Picasso was born in Spain - painted GUERNICA in in response to bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War in 1937
- -work portrays violence, helpless suffering and death
- -choice of black and white instead of color evokes urgency and excitement of a newspaper photograph
- -Guernica became international symbol of the horrors of war and the fight against TOTALITARIANISM
- –Guernica showed ruins of Guernica, Spain 1837
collapse of the stock market
1929 stock market crash - led to severe economic depression in the US —FDR worked to remedy by Works Progress administration
- –WPA funded painting projects (murals and public buildings) and performances by musicians and theater companies and employed writers to create a series of state and regional guidebooks
- -effects of depression were heightened by a drought in the Great Plains
Hollywood sound and color of 1930s
1930s motion picture changed dramatically and became popular in America
- -Al Jolson’s 1927 The Jazz Singer introduced sound into feature films - opened in Times Square
- –in addition the advent of Technicolor radically altered motion pictures
- -technicolor three strip process
growing globalization
no event underscores the growing globalization of the 20th century culture more than WWII
—the human destruction was about 40 M dead! - but even more devastating was the human capacity for genocide and murder revealed by Holocaust in Germ. and the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan
as colonial powers withdrew their troops from occupied territories to fight in the war, nationalist movements arose in India, Palestine, Algeria, Indonesia and Africa making the war’s impact truly global
- AFTER the war
- -Existential Doubt, Artistic Triumph, and the Culture of Consumption - Existentialism
- —Pessimistic existentialism in Europe was accompanied by out-of-control consumerism and prosperity in America
- –post war Europe was gripped by profound Pessimism
- –Jean Paul Sartre - human condition is defined by alienation, anxiety and sense of nothingness, but this did NOT abrogate the responsibility to act and create meaning
- -Sartre said - in a word - man must create his own essence - it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering and struggling in it that he defines himself little by little
existential feminism
De Beauvoir - wrote the second sex
- –the myth of femininity
- -she was well aware that woman is often pleased with her role as “other” - or her secondary status beside men
- -the reason for this she explains is women’s unwillingness to give up the advantages men confer upon them
Abstract expressionists
Abstract expressionists
- -the unprecedented prosperity of the US after the war included the intro. of new products and services and the mass adoption of TV as primary form of entertainment
- -the counter-note of sincerity was struck by Abstract Expressionists
- –Pollack and Willem de Kooning – abandon representation in favor of expressing emotions on the canvas into totally abstract terms (throwing paint at a canvas randomly)
a second variety of Abstract Expressionism (color-field painting) offered viewers a more meditative and quiet painting based on large expanses of relatively undifferentiated color
–green on blue example
The beats
the beats generation - younger rebellious generation of writers and artists - began to critique American culture
—Allen Ginsberg lashed out in poem “Howl” with uncensored frankness that seemed to many an affront to decency
Frank Lloyd Wright
continued international architecture style in America
- –famous Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in NC
- -conscious counter-statement to rationalist geometry
Andy Warhol and pop art
Andy Warhol - campbell’s soup cans art
—paintings literalness redefined the Am. landscape as the visual equivalent of the supermarket aisle — POP ART became attached to work like Warhol’s
Pop art is -
a critique of consumer culture
—to get us to think critically about consumer culture
—Roy Lichtenstein
Minimalist art
Frank stella
- -minimalist art - composed simply of copper metallic parallel lines painted carefully btwn visible pencil marks
- –its austere geometry and lack of expressive tech. – represents a revolt against the same commodity culture targeted by POP artists
- Multiplicity and Diversity AND w/o boundaries
Civil rights briefly
- –by 1963 - Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led by reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had decided that Birmingham, Alabama would be focal point of civil rights movement
- –arrested for leading protest efforts there, King wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail - cry for fight against racial injustice
- -African American leader Malcolm X assassinated in 1965
- -Dr. MLK Jr. assassinated 1968
- -some schools in south not integrated until 1970s
Vietnam war
Vietnam war generated a great protest movement around the world, especially America - that generated new art, music, and artistic principles of practices
- –Gil Heron’s “Revolution will not be televised” - precursor to rap
- –in art world, many artists saw museums as being in collusion w/ powers that had started and now benefitted from the war
- -artists in protest turned to conceptual, land based art that didn’t depend on gallery support
Postmodernism
applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism
- –POST MODERNISM - largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality
- -stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it but constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality
- –postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races - instead focuses on relative truths of each person
characteristics
- -irony, dark humor
- -one text references many others
- -metafiction - fan fiction
- -temporal distortion (time travel)
- -paranoia
- -lack of trust in authority figures
- -globalism
Vlado Milunic
The Rasin Building, or Dancing House or “Ginger and Fred” in Prague, Czech Republic
- –Milunic wanted to build a building that represented modern Prague
- –2 parts: like a society that forgot its totalitarian past (a static past) and a society that forgot its totalitarian past but was moving into a world full of changes
- -two dialogues of tension
Postmodern architect has no choice to design with various, even contradictory elements in order to comm. not a homogenous sense of unit, but rather a difficult whole
Frank Gehry - Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain 1997
–draws attention to itself as architecture
structuralism
there is no meaning, only a plurality of meanings
- –act of reading cultural texts becomes an act of decoding mytholigies or multiple meanings
- -call id deconstruction
- -sign = signifier
- -popular by French theorist Jacques Derrida
Louise Lawler - Pollock and Tureen
Pollock’s paining above a pot
—Lawler both underscores the fact that the painting is, like the tureen, a marketable object and suggests that the expressive qualities of the original work—its reflection of Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist feelings—have been emptied, or at least nearly so, when looked at in this context”
Cindy Sherman
Sherman’s work mines our familiarity with popular culture and stereotypes
- –presents to us herself - in multiple poses and costumes - and asks us to fill in the story from any number of films we may have seen
- -female types show femininity - which is a performance
