Lecture 8 Art Informel/modernist architecture

Question 1

What is art informel interested in?

Answer 1

Different types of reality and social structures. Wanted to question motions of childhood and psychology.

Question 2

What are surrealists interested in?

Answer 2

Notion of baseness. Objects have lives outside how we know them, they are informed. Interested in space, things thrown away, memory, and trauma.

Question 3

What became a muse for surrealists?

Answer 3

Paris.

Question 4

What does Dubuffet’s ‘smoker by a wall 1945’ show? *

Answer 4

A comical clown like figure but sinister. Time of reflection.

Question 5

What art movement existed before abstraction?

Answer 5

American abstraction.

Question 6

Describe the features of Dubuffet’s Olympia 1950

Answer 6

Body is formless, and flattened. Becomes just ‘stuff’ and whole mass of material. Haute pate notion of trauma.

Question 7

What does Dubuffet’s ‘will to power 1946’ show?

Answer 7

A reworking of themes and ideas. Looks like hitler but doesn’t look strong anymore.

Question 8

What did Wols did pictures of in the 1930s?

Answer 8

Photographs of kidneys, rabbits heards. Things that are normally disregarded and not represented in art.

Question 9

What did Wols paint in the 1940s?

Answer 9

Paints the relationship between philosophy and art.

Question 10

What was Wols nicknamed? And where was his work shown?

Answer 10

Hailed a French Jackson pollock, however produced in a completely different conditions. Work shown in NYC.

Question 11

What type of art was produced in the late 19th/20th century?

Answer 11

Art Brute/Crude art/Raw arts

Question 12

What did Art Brut depict?

Answer 12

Primitivism, the noble savage beyond bourgeois cultures and norms. The unseen/the fugitive. Tried to find alternative kind of beings, eg myths, fairy tales.

Question 13

Who was the artist thought to be during Art Brut era?

Answer 13

An outsider, mad genius.

Question 14

What did modernist architecture represent?

Answer 14

A break from the past. Buildings promoted health and movement of air.

Question 15

What would modernist say was beautiful?

Answer 15

Functionalist and minimalist buildings. No excess, and streamlining.

Question 16

Why were stilts an important aspect of modernist buildings?

Answer 16

Helped to circulate air and life.

Question 17

Describe typical modernist buildings

Answer 17

Stilts, light and airy. Steel frames. Communicates with the outside. Flat roofs. Balconies. Not just white, primary colours as well.

Question 18

When was the end of modernism/beginning of post modern and what marked it?

Answer 18

Dynamite 1972.

Question 19

What era is Art informal associated with?

Answer 19

France post 1845

Question 20

What is the painting and what does relate to?

Answer 20

Dubuffet’s Olympia.

Question 22

What was the name of the ideological ‘war’ occurring at the time of Abstract Expressionism?

Answer 22

The Cold War.

Question 23

Greenberg declares that American avant-garde painting places greater emphasis on the ‘flatness’ of what?

Answer 23

The surface.

Question 24

The technique deployed by Jackson Pollock is generally referred to as what type of painting?

Answer 24

Drip.

Question 25

What is the title of Jean Dubuffet’s 1948 text?

Answer 25

‘Crude Art preferred to Cultural Art’

Question 26

Which group of artists was Dubuffet affiliated to in the late 1940s?

Question 27

Demoiselles d’Avignon is important for modernist painting because

Question 29

Which term does NOT characterise modernist architecture?

Answer 29

Pastiche.

Question 30

Is Mies van der Rohe a modernist or post modernist?

Answer 30

Modernist. Rohe said less is more.

Question 31

Which phrase best describes modernist architecture according to the postmodernist Robert Venturi ?

Answer 31

less is a bore.