Painting & Drawing Flashcards
Francis Picabia, Ideal (Here, This Is Stieglitz Here), 1915
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
New York Dada
Francis Picabia created Here, This Is Stieglitz Here (Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz) in 1915, after having relocated to New York from Paris earlier that year. While in New York, the Cubist painter met the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who would later organize an exhibition of Picabia’s works at his legendary gallery 291 and collaborate with him on the Dada publication 291 in which Here first appeared. In this portrait, Picabia is clearly referencing Duchamp’s machinist aesthetic as well as his ironic wit. Part of a series of machine portraits of his artist-friends in New York, Here depicts Stieglitz as a broken bellows camera with an automobile brake attached to it that is in motion. It is important to underscore that this series of machine portraits did not celebrate the hyper-mechanized culture of the early twentieth century. Machinist imagery formed a vocabulary that Picabia drew upon in order to capture the modern human spirit. His work is not a comment on the frenzied fascination with which contemporary culture viewed the machine but, rather, a demonstration of how such mechanized symbols can successfully articulate the seemingly opposed values of an individual’s sensibility. Picabia has written “Ideal” in an old-fashioned, delicate, highly detailed script that effectively contrasts with the modern-day, sleek machine upon which it perches. The elaborate Gothic font hearkens back to an outdated mode of portraiture and, generally speaking, of painting, against which Picabia is clearly working. More importantly, it addresses Stieglitz’s own idealism that, according to those in his circle, had failed to inspire Americans toward self-discovery through art and photography. Indeed, Stieglitz’s goal was too grandiose, hence the lofty placement of “Ideal” above the mass-produced object—an object that connotes a commercially driven reality more characteristic of America at this moment in history. Spearheading the effort to introduce the dominant artistic practices of Europe to American artists, Here embraces the humor with which Picabia and Duchamp mocked traditional artistic styles and techniques, and that would characterize their proto-Dada practices during the time they lived in New York.
Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho, 1993
Young British Artists (YBA)
24 Hour Psycho is the title of an art installation created by artist Douglas Gordon in 1993. The work consists entirely of an appropriation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho slowed down to approximately two frames a second, rather than the usual 24. As a result it lasts for exactly 24 hours, rather than the original 109 minutes. The film was an important work in Gordon’s early career, and is said to introduce themes common to his work, such as “recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light.”
“24 Hour Psycho, as I see it, is not simply a work of appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation… it wasn’t a straightforward case of abduction. The original work is a masterpiece in its own right, and I’ve always loved to watch it. … I wanted to maintain the authorship of Hitchcock so that when an audience would see my 24 Hour Psycho they would think much more about Hitchcock and much less, or not at all, about me…”
A large mirror reflects Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho back at itself, beginning a game of spatial illusion and psychological instability that continues throughout the exhibition.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs[1] — also referred to as Brit artists and Britart — is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988. Many of the artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s.
The scene began around a series of artist-led exhibitions held in warehouses and factories, beginning in 1988 with the Damien Hirst-led Freeze and, in 1990, East Country Yard Show and Modern Medicine.
They are noted for “shock tactics”, use of throwaway materials, wild-living, and an attitude “both oppositional and entrepreneurial.”[2] They achieved considerable media coverage and dominated British art during the 1990s—international survey shows in the mid-1990s included Brilliant! and Sensation.
Many of the artists were initially supported and collected by Charles Saatchi. Leading artists of the group include Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Key works include Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine, and Emin’s My Bed, a dishevelled double bed surrounded by detritus.
The first use of the term “young British artists” was by Michael Corris in ArtForum, May 1992.[3] The acronym term “YBA” (or “yBa”) was not coined until 1996 (in Art Monthly magazine). It has become a historic term, as most of the YBAs were born in the mid-1960s.
David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967
Tate Gallery, London
British Pop Art
A Bigger Splash was painted between April and June 1967 when Hockney was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. The image is derived in part from a photograph Hockney discovered in a book on the subject of building swimming pools. The background is taken from a drawing he had made of Californian buildings. A Bigger Splash is the largest and most striking of three ‘splash’ paintings. The Splash (private collection) and A Little Splash (private collection) were both completed in 1966. They share compositional characteristics with the later version. All represent a view over a swimming pool towards a section of low-slung, 1960s modernist architecture in the background. A diving board juts out of the margin into the paintings’ foreground, beneath which the splash is represented by areas of lighter blue combined with fine white lines on the monotone turquoise water. The positioning of the diving board – coming at a diagonal out of the corner – gives perspective as well as cutting across the predominant horizontals. The colours used in A Larger Splash are deliberately brighter and bolder than in the two smaller paintings in order to emphasise the strong Californian light. The yellow diving board stands out dramatically against the turquoise water of the pool, which is echoed in the intense turquoise of the sky. Between sky and water, a strip of flesh-coloured land denotes the horizon and the space between the pool and the building.
The painting took about two weeks to complete, providing an interesting contrast with his subject matter for the artist. Hockney has explained: ‘When you photograph a splash, you’re freezing a moment and it becomes something else. I realise that a splash could never be seen this way in real life, it happens too quickly. And I was amused by this, so I painted it in a very, very slow way.’ (Quoted in Kinley, [p.5].)
He had rejected the possibility of recreating the splash with an instantaneous gesture in liquid on the canvas. In contrast with several of his earlier swimming pool paintings, which contain a male subject, often naked and viewed from behind, the ‘splash’ paintings are empty of human presence. However, the splash beneath the diving board implies the presence of a diver.
This painting depicts a splash in a Californian swimming pool. Hockney first visited Los Angeles in 1963, a year after graduating from the Royal College of Art, London. He returned there in 1964 and remained, with only intermittent trips to Europe, until 1968 when he came back to London. In 1976 he made a final trip back to Los Angeles and set up permanent home there. He was drawn to California by the relaxed and sensual way of life. He commented: ‘the climate is sunny, the people are less tense than in New York … When I arrived I had no idea if there was any kind of artistic life there and that was the least of my worries.’
In California, Hockney discovered, everybody had a swimming pool. Because of the climate, they could be used all year round and were not considered a luxury, unlike in Britain where it is too cold for most of the year. Between 1964 and 1971 he made numerous paintings of swimming pools. In each of the paintings he attempted a different solution to the representation of the constantly changing surface of water.
Richard Long, A Hundred Mile Walk, 1971‐2
Tate Gallery, London
British Conceptualism / Land Art
This work records a walk Richard Long made on Dartmoor during New Year 1971–2, repeatedly following a circular route. In the work he records his experience of sounds heard on the walk, how he became aware of the presence of rivers as he approached them, pockets of sound in gullies, and how the sound disappeared behind him as he walked on.
The work concerns both the internal feelings and thoughts of the artist, and the external aspects of his experience during the walk. ‘Corrina, Corrina’ (Day 6) is a reference to a traditional folk song, sung by Bob Dylan.
Long made his international reputation during the 1970s, but already with sculptures made as the result of epic walks, these take him through rural and remote areas in Britain, or as far afield as the plains of Canada, Mongolia and Bolivia.
He walks at different times for different reasons. At times, these are predetermined courses and concepts; yet equally, the idea of the walk may assert itself in an arbitrary circumstance. Guided by a great respect for nature and by the formal structure of basic shapes, Long never makes significant alterations to the landscapes he passes through. Instead he marks the ground or adjusts the natural features of a place by up-ending stones for example, or making simple traces. He usually works in the landscape but sometimes uses natural materials in the gallery. Different modes of presentation, sometimes combined, were used to bring his experience of nature back into the museum or gallery.
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, No. 5, 1962
Abstract Expressionism: Hard-edge painting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5nej7Gy7kQ
Stanton MacDonald‐Wright, Abstraction on
Spectrum (Organization 5), 1914
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
Synchromism
Stanton MacDonald-Wright (July 8, 1890 – August 22, 1973), was a modern American artist. He was a co-founder of Synchromism, an early abstract, color-based mode of painting, which was the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention.
Married at the age of seventeen, Macdonald-Wright moved to Paris with his wife to immerse himself in European art and to study at the Sorbonne, the Académie Julian, the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Colarossi. He and fellow student Morgan Russell studied with Canadian painter Percyval Tudor-Hart between 1911 and 1913. They were deeply influenced by their teacher’s color theory, which connected the qualities of color to those of music, as well as by the works of Delacroix, the Impressionists, Cézanne, and Matisse that placed a great emphasis on juxtapositions and reverberations of color.[3] During these years MacDonald-Wright and Russell developed Synchromism (meaning “with color”), seeking to free their art form from a literal description of the world and believing that painting was a practice akin to music that should be divorced from representational associations.[4] MacDonald-Wright collaborated with Russell in painting abstract “synchromies” and staged Synchromist exhibitions in Munich in June 1913, in Paris in October 1913, and in New York in March 1914. These established Synchromism as an influence in modern art well into the 1920s,[5] though followers of other abstract artists (principally, the Orphists Robert and Sonia Delaunay) were later to claim that the Synchromists had merely borrowed the principles of color abstraction from Orphism, a point vehemently disputed by Macdonald-Wright and Russell. While in Europe, Macdonald-Wright met Matisse, Rodin, and Gertrude and Leo Stein. He and Russell returned to the United States hopeful of acclaim and financial success and were eager to promote their cause.
Piero Manzoni, Achrome, 1959
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Around 1957 Manzoni began the Achromes series. Some were executed in raw gesso that had been scratched and scored, and others, for example Achrome (1959; Paris, Pompidou), consisted of cut or pleated canvas and kaolin. Although Manzoni had discovered the work of Yves Klein in early 1957 and apparently had been profoundly impressed, his own Achromes signify something different from Klein’s monochromatic works: the desire to create a space devoid of any image of colour, mark or material.
Like a number of his contemporaries, Manzoni wanted to banish narrative content from painting. For Manzoni, this meant removing even colour from his works. In 1957, he began to produce the achromes, which he described as ‘a single uninterrupted and continuous surface from which anything superfluous and all interpretative possibilities are excluded.’ He began by soaking his canvases in kaolin, a soft china clay used in making porcelain. The kaolin eliminated colour to the point of his desired ‘nothingness’. The weight of the material caused it to sag, creating folds across the surface of the canvas.
Manzoni’s work changed irrevocably after visiting Yves Klein’s exhibition ‘Epoca Blu’ at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, January 1957. This exhibition consisted of 11 identical blue monochromes. By the end of the year he had ceased producing work influenced by the prevailing trends in Art Informel, to works that responded directly to Klein’s monochromes.
The kaolin works are generally made from clay covered canvases folded horizontally, or sometimes cut-out squares of canvas coated in the clay and adhered onto the canvas. As well as Yves Klein, these works showed the influence of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri and the American artist Robert Rauschenberg, who had painted neutral white canvases in 1951.
Later he would create Achromes from white cotton wool, fiberglass, rabbit skin and bread rolls. He also experimented with phosphorescent paint and cobalt chloride so that the colours would change over time. In addition to these fabricated materials, the artist’s own bodily products and features became art. In addition to his famous Merda d’Artista, in which Manzoni’s own excrement became a series of art objects, the use of fingerprints, blood, and breath also figured into his experimental body of work
Sherrie Levine, After Piet Mondrian, 1983
Appropriation Art
Watercolor reproduction
Sherrie Levine was born in 1947 in Hazelton, Pennsylvania. She attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, receiving her BA in 1969 and her MFA in 1973. She moved to Berkeley in 1973 and two years later relocated to New York. Her early series, Sons and Lovers (1976–77), presented thrity-five different configurations of five silhouettes, including the readily identifiable profiles of former presidents Lincoln, Washington, and Kennedy. Critic and curator Douglas Crimp included this work in his seminal exhibition Pictures at Artists Space in New York in 1977. Levine again utilized the presidential profiles in 1979, this time cut from pages in fashion magazines, for the series Presidential Collages. For Fashion Collages (1979), she exhibited unaltered images from magazines mounted on sheets of paper. In the early 1980s Levine extended her strategy of appropriation, which challenged art-critical concepts like originality and authenticity, when she rephotographed works by famous photographers including Eliot Porter, Edward Weston, and Walker Evans. For her series After Egon Schiele (1982/2001), Levine photographed the Expressionist painter’s frenzied, acutely personal self-portraits, which she later copied in watercolor in 2001. She also exhibited excised reproductions of works by Andreas Feininger, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh, among others, as her own collages in 1980, 1982, and 1983, respectively. Also in 1983 Levine began to meticulously recreate—whether in watercolor, ink, or photolithography—printed reproductions of works by iconic male modernists like Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Edgar Degas.
In After Alexander Rodchenko (1987–98), Levine appropriated the photographs of the Russian Constructivist. This time with the help of a computer, Levine reduced iconic modernist works by the likes of Piet Mondrian, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Claude Monet to their most basic coloristic summaries in grids entitled Melt Down (1989–90). The artist then fashioned several sculptural pieces after works by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Constantin Brancusi: The Bachelors (After Marcel Duchamp) (1989), La Fortune: After Man Ray (1990), Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp) (1991), and Newborn (1993). In 1997 Levine began to divide her time between New York and Santa Fe, the latter of which prompted her to create several bronze sculptures of steer sculls between 2002 and 2003. In 2007 Levine again reduced pivotal modernist expressions of nature to computer-derived grids in After Cezanne.
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930
Art Institute of Chicago
American Realism (Regionalism)
The title’s inspiration came from the style of architecture called American Gothic in Iowa. The painting shows a farmer and his spinster daughter. The painting acquired considerable backlash in Iowa when it was accepted by the Art Institute of Chicago in a prize.
Famous image of Midwestern Regionalism, done after the Great Depression, represents sturdy regionalism and religious piety, some critics believe it to be a satire. The painting’s representation of individualism is important in a time of farm foreclosures, bank failures, and sharp decline in economic production. History painting in the sense that the farmhouse is Gothic in style, representative of spiritual morality, and the figures reinforce the spiritual uprightness of Gothicism.
- Regionalism: Wood, Benton, Curry; all focused on farms and small-town life of the American heartland
- They presented optimistic views, overlooking growing disaster of Dust Bowl
- Regionalists focused on rural life as America’s cultural background (in opposition to the
precisionists who enamored the city and technological advances)
- 1935 – published “Revolt against the City”
- American Gothic is a rural scene from Iowa, where he was born and raised
- This image catapulted Wood to national prominence
- House is “Carpenter Gothic” style
- This stresses the importance of religion in their lives
- Pitchfork signifies occupation
- Daughter associated with potted plants (behind her) which symbolize traditionally
feminine domestic and horticultural skills
- They wear traditional attire: worn overalls and apron trimmed with rickrack
- Dour facial expressions give painting severe quality
- Shows Midwesterners as “basically good and solid people”
- Regionalism was a rejection of avant-garde styles in favor of a readable, realist style
- It appealed to many who felt alienated by abstraction in art
- In light of problematic nationalism in Germany at time, this nationalistic attitude was
disturbing
- Thus regionalism had both stylistic and political implications
- Regionalism was a means of coping with the national crisis by returning to cultural roots
- Acceptable nostalgia because it perpetuated a larger purpose, survival
Charles Sheeler,
American Landscape, 1930
Museum of Modern Art, New York
American Regionalism
Karel Appel, Angry Landscape, 1967
COBRA / Tachisme
The Cobra artists, from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, share the interest in materials that characterized the work of Tapies and Burri, but like Dubuffet, they are more significantly drawn to the notion of “art brut” and children’s art. They embraced the notion of the subconscious as expressed in surrealist writing and art but they rejected the idea that art could come from the psychic unconscious without conscious physical control. In the place of psychic automatism, they tried to assert impurity and spontaneity as deliberate processes which would unform one’s initial perception of images; this was a deliberate attempt to harness the imagination to the perceptual world, and like Pollock, it seems to have been a deliberate attempt to represent the idea of spontaneity and impurity as opposed to producing work which truly comes from these states.
Appel’s and Jorn’s early paintings rely on heavy impasto and brilliant color, directly influenced by Van Gogh, more than any other artist, although Appel believed that any artist must learn from all artists at first, then has to forget what he learned and start over.
Karel Appel is possibly of greater interest for his three-dimensional work than for his painting, although the underlying premises are shared in both forms of production. If we were to describe Appel as having had a choice between Mondrian and Van Gogh (two artists who share his nationality but embody different paths: reason and order on one side and expressionist freedom on the other), he chose the latter as an approach which expressed the need for and manifestation of renewal. After the first world war, the dadaists responded with mockery and disorder; the de Stijl artists and other purists responded with an attempt to transcend horror; neither worked. The expressionist response– Van Gogh in the 19th century and the abstract expressionists in the 20th–in some respects is an attempt to unite both disorder and transcendence, not by reifying the horrors of what happened but by reliving it and changing it, by embracing the messy complexity and the irrational horror of the world, living through it, and achieving catharsis.
Frederick Kiesler, Art of this Century, 1942
Installation view of the Surrealist Gallery
The Art of This Century gallery was opened by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City on October 20, 1942. The gallery occupied two commercial spaces on the seventh floor of a building that was part of the midtown arts district including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Non-objective Painting, Helena Rubinstein’s New Art Center, and numerous commercial galleries. The gallery exhibited important contemporary art until it closed in 1947, when Guggenheim returned to Europe. The gallery was designed by architect, artist, and visionary Frederick Kiesler.
One of the most-recognized and reproduced exhibition spaces of the twentieth century, the Surrealist Gallery was Frederick Kiesler’s design masterpiece. Within the long black-painted room, hanging curvilinear wall units displayed all the Surrealist works jutting out toward the viewer on adjustable arms. As originally presented, spotlights illuminated the paintings individually in a random electrically controlled sequence. At times the gallery was plunged into complete darkness accompanied by the ominous sound of an oncoming train.
The gallery showcased works by established European artists with an emphasis on Surrealism, and also exhibited the works of lesser known American artists, often for the first time. The space became both a meeting place and exhibition nexus for exiled European artists and young emerging Americans and as such was one of the major crucibles for the emergence of the New York School.
Art of This Century was divided into four distinct spaces: the Abstract Gallery, the Surrealist Gallery, the Kinetic Gallery, and the Daylight Gallery. The Abstract, Surrealist, the Kinetic Galleries showcased the permanent private collection which Peggy Guggenheim had amassed in Europe with the assistance of curator Herbert Read and artist Marcel Duchamp. The Daylight Gallery was used for the fifty-three temporary exhibitions featuring the work of one-hundred-and-three artists that took place from the winter of 1942 to the summer of 1947.
For his object designs, such as the biomorphic furniture in his Abstract Gallery room of Peggy Guggenheim’s The Art of This Century Gallery art salon (1942), for example. For it, he sought to dissolve the visual, real, image, and environment into a free-flowing space. He likewise pursued this approach with his “Endless House,” exhibited in maquette form in 1958–59 at The Museum of Modern Art. The project stemmed from his shop-window displays of the 1920s and his Film Guild Cinema in New York City, mentioned above. Pursuing display and art-gallery work, he was a window designer for Saks Fifth Avenue from 1928 to 1930. Earlier in his career in Europe, Kiesler invented the 1924 L+T (Leger und Trager) radical hanging system for galleries and museums.
His unorthodox architectural drawings and plans that he called “polydimensional” were somewhat akin to Surrealist automatic drawings.
André Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1926
Surrealism
-automatic drawing
Masson made Battle of Fishes by freely applying gesso to areas of the canvas, throwing sand on it, then brushing away the excess. The resulting contours suggested forms “although almost always irrational ones,” according to the artist around which he rapidly sketched and applied paint directly from the tube. The image that emerged suggests a savage underwater battle between sharp–toothed fish. Masson, who was physically and spiritually wounded during World War I, joined the Surrealist group in 1924. He believed that, if left to chance, pictorial compositions would reveal the sadism of all living creatures.
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Morris Louis, Beta Kappa, 1961 (Veil series)
Abstract Expressionism: Color Field Painting
In 1948, he pioneered the use of Magna paint - a newly developed oil based acrylic paint made for him by his friends, New York City paintmakers Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden. In 1952, Louis moved to Washington, D.C.. Living in Washington, D.C., he was somewhat apart from the New York scene and he was working almost in isolation. During the 1950s he and a group of artists that included Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Tom Downing, Howard Mehring Anne Truitt and Hilda Thorpe among others were central to the development of Color Field painting. The basic point about Louis’s work and that of other Color Field painters, sometimes known as the Washington Color School in contrast to most of the other new approaches of the late 1950s and early 1960s, is that they greatly simplified the idea of what constitutes the look of a finished painting. They continued in a tradition of painting exemplified by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Ad Reinhardt. Eliminating gestural, compositional drawing in favor of large areas of raw canvas, solid planes of thinned and fluid paint, utilizing an expressive and psychological use of flat, and intense color and allover, repetitive composition. One of Louis’s most important series of Color Field paintings were his Unfurleds
Louis and Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio, where they saw and were greatly impressed by her stain paintings especially Mountains and Sea (1952). Upon their return to Washington, Louis and Noland together experimented with various techniques of paint application. Louis characteristically applied extremely diluted, thinned paint to an unprimed, unstretched canvas, allowing it to flow over the inclined surface in effects sometimes suggestive of translucent color veils. The importance of Frankenthaler’s example in Louis’s development of this technique has been noted.[1] Louis reported that he thought of Frankenthaler as the bridge between Jackson Pollock and the possible. However, even more so than Frankenthaler, Louis eliminated the brush gesture, although his flat, thin pigment is at times modulated in billowing and subtle tones.
In 1954, Louis produced his mature Veil Paintings, which were characterized by overlapping, superimposed layers of transparent color poured onto and stained into sized or unsized canvas.[2] The Veil Paintings consist of waves of brilliant, curving color-shapes submerged in translucent washes through which separate colors emerge principally at the edges. Although subdued, the resulting color is immensely rich. In another series, the artist used long parallel bands and stripes of pure color arranged side by side in rainbow effects.
Louis destroyed many of his paintings between 1955 and 1957. He resumed work on the Veils in 1958–59. These were followed by Florals and Columns (1960), Unfurleds (1960–61)—in which rivulets of more opaque, intense color flow from both sides of large white fields of raw canvas—and finally the Stripe paintings (1961–62). Between summer 1960 and January/February 1961, he created about 150 Unfurleds, generally on mural-size canvases.
Chuck Close
Big Self‐portrait, 1968
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Photorealism
Although his later paintings differ in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived ‘average’ hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 107.5 in by 83.5 in (2.73 m by 2.12 m) canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of mars black acrylic.
Wols, Bird, 1949
The Menil Collection, Houston
Archibald Motley, Jr.
Black Belt, 1934
Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia
Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, 1961
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Sonia Delaunay, Blanket, 1911
Mikhail Larionov, Blue Rayonism, 1912
George Bellows
Both Members of This Club
1909
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
Lynda Benglis, Bounce, 1969
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie‐Woogie,
1942‐43
Jorg Immendorff, Café Deutschland 1, 1977‐78
Ludwig‐Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen
Fernand Khnopff, Caresses, 1896
Musées Royaux des Beaux‐Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Max Ernst, Celebes, 1921
Théodore Géricault, Charging Chasseur, 1812
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Jean Arp, Collage Arranged According to the
Laws of Chance, 1916‐17
Alberto Burri, Composition, 1953
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Art Informel
In 1943 Alberto Burri, a doctor in the Italian army, was captured by the British and sat out the remainder of World War II in a Texas POW camp. He began to paint there, covering his stretchers with burlap when other materials were unavailable. Upon his return to Italy in 1946 Burri renounced his original profession and dedicated himself to making art.
Composition is one of his Sacchi (sacks), a group of collage constructions made from burlap bags mounted on stretchers, which the artist began making in 1949. One of Burri’s first series employing nontraditional mediums, the Sacchi were initially considered assaults against the established aesthetic canon. His use of the humble bags may be seen as a declaration of the inherent beauty of natural, ephemeral materials, in contradistinction to traditional “high” art mediums, which are respected for their ostentation and permanence. Early commentators suggested that the patchwork surfaces of the Sacchi metaphorically signified living flesh violated during warfare—the stitching was linked to the artist’s practice as a physician. Others suggested that the hardships of life in postwar Italy predicated the artist’s redeployment of the sacks in which relief supplies were sent to the country.
Yet Burri maintained that his use of materials was determined purely by the formal demands of his constructions. “If I don’t have one material, I use another. It is all the same,” he said in 1976. “I choose to use poor materials to prove that they could still be useful. The poorness of a medium is not a symbol: it is a device for painting.” The title Composition emphasizes the artist’s professed concern with issues of construction, not metaphor. Underlying the work is a rigorous compositional structure that belies the mundane impermanence of his chosen mediums and points to art-historical influences. The Sacchi rely on lessons learned from the Cubist- and Dada-inspired constructions of Kurt Schwitters.
Despite Burri’s cool public stance, the Sacchi are examples of the Expressionism widely practiced in postwar Europe, where such work was called Art Informel (in the U.S. it was called Abstract Expressionism). Artists used powerfully rendered gestures and accommodated chance occurrences to express the existential angst characteristic of the period.
Vasily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913
Der Blaue Reiter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i16sGRY7SZ4&list=PL4A46CC7802913517
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue,
and Yellow, 1930
De Stijl
Mondrian attempted to find the essential abstraction of organic forms, adhered to De Stijl’s rational and universal idea of beauty. In this painting Mondrian uses only primary colors and 3 neutrals - white, grey, black. He called this dynamic equilibrium. He hoped to be the last artist because he thought if living were as harmonious and beautiful there would be no need for painting.
Carefully adjusted the design so that the tension between the rectangles is maintained to the very edges. The proportions of the rectangles are carefully varied as to avoid mechanical conformity of general equilibrium. Mondrian believed that in painting, equilibrium is best attained by the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions.
- De Stijl was ‘the style’, the ultimate, pure geometric elements
- Neoplasticism – This is nonobjective art, “pure plastic art” that expresses universal
reality
- Term coined by Schoenmaekers – a mathematician
- Yellow means vertical movement of sun’s rays
- Blue is earth’s orbit around the sun
- Red the union of both
- Expresses “Universal beauty” and “aesthetic expression of oneself”
- To create universal expression, an artist must communicate “a real equation of the
universal and individual” thus Mondrian only used…
• Essential formal vocabulary: 3 primary hues (red, yellow, blue), 3 neutral colors (white,
gray, black), horizontal and vertical lines
- No brushstrokes or texture
- Sought the essence of the “universal” in mature work, like Composition in Yellow, Red,Blue
- Eliminated representational elements since they have subjective associations and curves because of their sensual appeal
- Two linear directions symbolize harmony of series of opposites
o Male versus female
o Individual versus society
o Spiritual versus material
• Higher beauty achieved by resolving conflict, what he called dynamic equilibrium
Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman,
Concerto for TV, Cello, and Videotapes,
1971
Vladimir Tatlin, Counter‐Relief, 1915
Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Carnegie Hall NYC, March 1965
Fluxus
Ono was an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. A seminal performance work is Cut Piece, first performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. Cut Piece had one simple but destructive verb as its instruction: “Cut.” Ono executed the performance by walking on stage and casually kneeling on the floor in a draped garment, and audience members were requested to come on stage and begin cutting until she was naked.
The next year, she performed it at Carnegie Hall where it received a lot of attention.[2] She performed the piece again in London and other venues, garnering drastically different attention depending on the audience. In Japan, the audience was typically shy and cautious, while London participants were more zealous and she had to be protected by security.[2] She reprised the piece in Paris in 2003, in the low post-9/11 moment between the US and France saying she hoped to show that this is “a time where we need to trust each other.”
Thus there is no sense of an “original” performance – or any sense of priority for the artist’s own performances – even after the fact. The texts are not so much documents of a singular performance as the performances are realizations of the score. And whether these realizations are made by the artist herself or another performer – or whether they are made in 1964 or 2007 – makes little difference in this regard. While Allen suggests that performances of the sixties and seventies might be reenacted “in order to be reproduced, in order to exist,” she seems to recognize that there is more than this behind Ono’s 2003 performance when she notes that Ono mounted her Paris performance “not merely to ensure the continued existence of her work, but in order to make a difference in the present.”
Having conceived Cut Piece as an event score, Ono foresaw the work’s realization in a succession of presents. And from the start, she understood that in each of these presents the work would be transformed – not from any authentic original, but from an idea into an experience – each one distinct from the others. Ono has described her instruction works – or scores – as “seeds,” activated individually and collectively in the minds and actions of those who receive them. And as is often the case with her work, this germinating idea is manifest in multiple variations.
Hannah Höch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife Through the
Last Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of the Weimar Republic, 1919‐20
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E1cA3j_xY8&list=PL4A46CC7802913517
Sophie Taeuber, Dada Head, 1920
On Kawara, Date Painting, 1966,
from The Today Series
Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich, 1937
(Room 3 showing Dada Wall)
Anselm Kiefer, Departure from Egypt, 1984
Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, 1932‐33
Detroit Institute of the Arts
Tony Smith, Die, 1962
Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959
Georg Baselitz, Die grossen Freunde
(The Great Friends), 1965
Roberto Matta, Disasters of Mysticism, 1942
Surrealism
Originally, a student of architecture, Roberto Sebastiano Antonio Matta was discovered by André Breton in 1937 and welcomed into the Surrealist movement. Shortly after, in1939, he immigrated to the United States as an unknown artist. However, this did not last long. In 1940, in a solo exhibit held in Julien Levy Gallery he had an immense impact on American experimental artist. With American painter Robert Motherwell, Matta’s work helped fuse European Surrealism and the American movement to be identified as Abstract Expressionism. Within his exemplary piece of 1942 Disasters of Mysticism, he ventures into uncharted territory alluding to the ever-changing universe of outer space. He achieves this utilizing brilliant flame-light to the left of the work and the black depths of space to the right (Arnason & Mansfield 2010.).
Father of Gordon Matta Clark
Frantisek Kupka, Disks of Newton (Study for
Fugue in Two Colors), 1911‐1912
Käthe Kollwitz, Death Seizing a Woman, 1934
from the series Death, 1934‐36 (lithograph)
John Chamberlain, Dolores James, 1962
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Horace Pippin, Domino Players, 1943
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.
Bridget Riley, Drift 2, 1966
Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Gino Severini,
Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, 1912
Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912
Italian Futurism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHul281Kmtk&list=PL4A46CC7802913517
David Siqueiros, Echo of a Scream, 1937
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Stuart Davis, Egg Beater # 4, 1928
Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower in Trees, 1910
Robert Motherwell,
Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34, 1953‐54
Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D. C.
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
William Kentridge, drawing from Felix in Exile, 1994
Louise Bourgeois
Femme Maison
1947
Wassily Kandinsky,
final study for the cover of the Blaue Reiter Almanach, 1911
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954‐55
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Jean Arp, Fleur Marteau (Hammer Flower),
1916
Piet Mondrian, Flowering Apple Tree, 1912
Cy Twombly, Free Wheeler, 1955
Grace Hartigan, Giftwares, 1955
Neuberger Museum of Art, College of
Purchase, SUNY
Giacomo Balla, Girl Running on a Balcony, 1912
Pablo Picasso, Glass of Absinthe, spring 1914
Edward Coley Burne‐Jones
Golden Stairs, 1876‐80
Tate Britain, London Pre-Raphaelite
Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Cubism
This painting was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, a village in Northern Spain by Germans and Italian at the request of Spanish Nationalist forces. This work has come to be a great anti-war symbol, the embodiment of the human suffering of war.
Stark hallucinatory nightmare that became a powerful symbol of the brutality of war, restricted palette to grays in the tones of the newspaper photographs, represents the suffering Spanish republic represented by the bull, the bull could also symbolize Franco, woman with lantern suggests Picasso’s desire to reveal the event in all its horror.
- Picasso maintained a strong commitment to politics
- Declared, “Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument for offensive
and defensive war against the enemy.”
Late 1936-39 – Spanish Civil War
- Spanish Republican government in exile in Paris
- Ask Picasso to create work for Spanish pavilion at Paris International Exposition
- Like Mexican muralists, political and social message
- April 26, 1937 – Guernica – capital of Basque region, had almost been completely
destroyed in air raid by Nazi bombers acting on behalf of rebel general Francisco Franco
- Attacked during busiest hour of market day
- Killed 1600 people
- Palette to black, white, and gray – emphasizes severity, these are the tones of the newspaper photographs that publicized the atrocity
- Picasso would not allow painting to be exhibited in Spain while Generalissimo Francisco Franco was in power
- Is a testament to the tragic chapter in Spanish history
Amédée Ozenfant, Guitar and Bottles, 1920
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
John Sloan, Hairdresser’s Window, 1907
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut
Tina Modotti,
Number 29: Hands of Marionette Player, 1929
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Alexander Rodchenko,
Hanging Construction, 1920
Mark di Suvero, Hankchampion, 1960
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Jacob Lawrence, Harriet Tubman worked as a water girl to cotton pickers;
she also worked at plowing, carting, and hauling logs, 1939‐40
Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia
Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York, 1960
self‐destructing sculpture in the garden of The
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Joseph Albers, Homage to the Square:
Apparition, 1959
In 1950, at the age of 62, Albers began what would become his signature series, the Homage to the Square. Over the next 26 years, until his death in 1976, he produced hundreds of variations on the basic compositional scheme of three or four squares set inside each other, with the squares slightly gravitating towards the bottom edge. What may at first appear to be a very narrow conceptual framework reveals itself as one of extraordinary perceptual complexity. In 1965, he wrote of the series: ‘They all are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colours used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction - influencing and changing each other forth and back. Thus, character and feeling alter from painting to painting without any additional ‘hand writing’ or, so-called, texture. Though the underlying symmetrical and quasi-concentric order of squares remains the same in all paintings – in proportion and placement – these same squares group or single themselves, connect and separate in many different ways.’
Krysztof Wodiczko,
Homeless Projection: The Soldiers and
Sailors Civil War Memorial, 1987
Marino Marini, Horse and Rider, 1952‐53
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.
Allan Kaprow, photograph from Household, a Happening
commissioned by Cornell University, 1964
Georges Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, August 1908
Analytical Cubism
Considered the first truly Cubist painting, invoked the wit of Matisse (looked like “little cubes”)
depicting depth from multiplie, limited degrees– not by shading but through vertically building up the canvas
rejected by the Salon d’Automne of 1908
lack of clarified light source; limited palette; vertical build of landscape; multiple vantage points
Starts working with Picasso in 1909
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4jcm-WYvg
Max Pechstein, Indian and Woman, 1910
Adolph Menzel, Iron Rolling Mill, or Modern
Cyclops I, 1872‐75
Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s
homes so different, so appealing?, 1956
Kunsthalle Tübingen, Sammlung Zundel
Isamu Noguchi,
Kouros, 1944‐45
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York
Barbara Hepworth, Large and Small Form,
1934
Fernand Léger, Three Women (Le Grand Déjeuner), 1921
Agnes Martin, Leaf, 1965
Charles Demuth
I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, October 23, 1960
(photograph by Harry Shunk and Janos Kender)
Balthus, Les Beaux Jours (The Golden Days),
1944‐46
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.
Classism/Surrealist?
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
Christian Boltanski, Lessons of Darkness, 1987
Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland
Mona Hatoum, Light Sentence, 1992
Naum Gabo,
Linear Construction in Space, No. 1 (Variation), 1942‐43
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.
Constructivism
Natalia S. Goncharova, Linen, 1912
Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964‐65
John Marin, Lower Manhattan (Composition
Derived from Top of Woolworth Building) 1922
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
During the 1920s Marin’s handling became even more expressive and abbreviated, at times calligraphic, seen for example in Lower Manhattan (Composing Derived from Top of Woolworth) (watercolour, 1922; New York, MOMA); objects were further simplified into fractured coloured planes; directional lines suggesting movement were added and borders painted and fragmented. His city images underwent a major transformation in the 1930s, as the figures increased in scale and became more important elements in the scenes, demonstrated in Untitled (Figures in Downtown New York City) (drawing, 1932; artist’s estate, see 1971 exh. cat., p. 58). His style did not change substantially thereafter, although it became increasingly expressionistic.
Asger Jorn, L’avant‐garde ne se rend pas
(The Avant‐Garde Doesn’t Surrender), 1962
Situationist International / COBRA
‘Avant-garde se rend pas, made in 1962, is one of his Modifications (détournements) in which he took a painting found at the flea market by an anonymous painter and painted it over. Ultimately, L’Avant-garde se rend pas is a painting made by two authors.
In 1962 the artist-philosopher Asger Jorn produced one of his finest overpaintings, titled L’avant-garde ne se rend pas. The title could be translated to mean, variously, the avant garde doesn’t turn itself in, or the avant garde does not give up. It could also imply, more humourously, the avant garde doesn’t show up, and more complexly, the avant garde doesn’t make it, does not succeed – which could be interpreted in terms of art historical consecration or even in terms of some vain notion of historical victory – like the Nazis’ projected thousand year reich. Clearly, today’s rejection of the avant gardes is based on exaggerated notions of both their ambitions and their achievements.
Jorn sought to counter abstraction through rituals of play. One such ritual was that of Situationist détournement, in which the images of the spectacle were modified, transcending the opposition between artwork and mass cultural entertainment. Rather than signaling bourgeois formalism, detachment and commodifiability, the space of autonomy opened up by modernist aesthetics could be used to counteract the alienating effects of enlightenment rationality. Rather than inert objects destined for a rarefied museum culture, the overpaintings were conceived as intersubjective communication – there to be read, to be listened to, there to help restore the spontaneity of subjectivity, to introduce communication in the dialectic of subject and object. L’avant-garde ne se rend pas makes an obvious reference to Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q, a postcard of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with a moustache painted over it. Jorn’s overpainting is based on the purchase of a found painting, an anonymous kitsch object which he brought back into circulation through the gesture of the subjectivizing trace. In contrast to Pollock’s drip paintings, which were essentially concerned with the imminent unfolding of events within the field of painting, the overpaintings could refer to the broader form of economic production and the possibility of manufacturing to fulfill human needs rather than for the sake of profit.
Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Abstract Expressionism: Action Painting
As with Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, he was labeled an “action painter” because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas. For most of Kline’s [mature and representative] work, however, as the phrase goes, “spontaneity is practiced”. He would prepare many draft sketches—notably, commonly on refuse telephone book pages—before going to make his “spontaneous” work.
Two main tendencies emerged at an early stage that would later develop into a powerful contribution to the ‘gestural’ trend within Abstract Expressionism. Numerous small graphics, sketches and oils and the mural series Hot Jazz (Norfolk, VA, Chrysler Mus.), painted for a New York bar in 1940, reveal an interest in translating animated subjects into quick, rudimentary strokes. Kline admired and found inspiration in a wide range of artists notable for their fluency in handling paint, including Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Sargent and Whistler. By contrast, an inclination to compose in terms of simplified areas was derived from academic training and perhaps also reflected Kline’s memories of his native Pennsylvania’s coal-mining region, with its stark scenery, locomotives and similar massive mechanical shapes to which the titles of his later abstract images sometimes referred.
Kline fostered intense tonal contrasts, often working at night under strong light, and his use of housepainter’s brushes strengthened this aura of immediacy; tiny splatters or inflections accompanying the black wedges enhanced their explosive velocity. In the later 1950s such paintings as Requiem (1958; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.) added a third type of work to his repertory, by allowing the previously clearcut monochrome divisions to merge into a more complex chiaroscuro, the emotional tone of which Kline may have had in mind when he mentioned in an interview in 1960 the ‘brooding quality’ of certain ‘impending forms’.
Yves Tanguy, Mama, Papa is Wounded!, 1927
Pablo Picasso, Maquette for Guitar, 1912
Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962
Aleksandr Archipenko
Medrano II
1913
Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, Hannover,
destroyed 1943. Photo c.1931
Kurt Schwitters,
Merzbild 25A , 1920
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein‐
Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Thomas Hart Benton
Missouri Mural, section
1936
Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City, MO
American Realism (Regionalism)
Benton worked mostly in Missouri, depicting both truth and legend of the state’s history. This mural for the Missouri State Capital, this segment shows a white man using whiskey to barter with a native american along with scenes documenting the building of Missouri.
* Stock market crash of October 1929 marked start of Great Depression
* Art market disappeared
* To preserve American art, government launched a variety of programs to provide relief for artists
* The Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned work for public buildings, but was not a relief program, artists had to compete for commissions
* Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration provided relief to unemployed artists and employed more than 6 million workers
* This is a federally funded mural installed at a public site
* Benton focused on scenes of his native Missouri (just as Wood on Iowa)
* Mural depicts images of state’s true and legendary history
* It is part documentary and part imaginative
* Positive and negative aspects of Missouri’s history
* Very site specific
* Primitive agriculture, a lynching, old-fashioned political meeting, mining industry Native Americans, family life, white man using whiskey to barter with Native American
* This is an accessible style for the Midwestern public that would have viewed it
* It is a reassuring image of America’s heartland during the Great depression
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Vanna, 1866
Tate Gallery, London
This is one of a series of decorative pictures of beautiful and sensual women, which Rossetti produced in the mid 1860s. The model is Alexa Wilding, who sat for some of Rossetti’s best-known works, including La Ghirlandata (1873, Guildhall Art Gallery, Corporation of London) and The Blessed Damozel (1875-8, Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts). The spiral pearl clasp in her flowing auburn hair and the red coral necklace appear frequently in Rossetti’s pictures of women. Along with the sweeping movement of her arms, the green rosettes on her shoulder and the floral earrings, they serve to accentuate the picture’s circular composition. The heavily embroidered white and gold drapery is used in other pictures of this date, including Monna Rosa (untraced). The enormous sleeve recalls Raphael’s portrait of Giovanna of Aragon in the Louvre.
Rossetti originally called the picture Venus Veneta, and intended it to represent ‘a Venetian lady in a rich dress of white and gold, - in short the Venetian ideal of female beauty’ (quoted in a letter dated 27 September 1866, Doughty & Wahl, II, p.606). After the picture was finished he changed the title to Monna Vanna, denoting a ‘vain woman’, a name taken from Dante’s Vita Nuova, which Rossetti had translated in October 1848. Rossetti considered the painting to be one of his best works and declared it ‘probably the most effective as a room decoration that I have ever painted’.
In 1873 Rossetti retouched the picture, lightening the hair and altering the rings, which had been criticised for their clashing colours. He also changed the title to Belcolore, believing that the subject looked too modern for its previous title. Despite this, the painting continued to be known as Monna Vanna. It was first owned by the Cheshire collector W. Blackmore, who also owned Fazio’s Mistress (Tate N03055), and later passed into the hands of George Rae of Birkenhead, one of Rossetti’s most important patrons.
Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1959
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Paul Cezanne, Mont Saint‐Victoire Seen from
Les Lauves, 1902‐06
Ando Hiroshige,
Moon Pine at Ueno from One Hundred
Views of Famous Places in Edo, 1857
Japanese Woodblock Print
A Japanese ukiyo-e artist (a genre of woodblock prints), considered the last great master of that tradition.
The popular Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series by Hokusai was a strong influence on Hiroshige’s choice of subject, though Hiroshige’s approach was more poetic and ambient than Hokusai’s bolder, more formal prints.
It is a work that inspired a number of Western artists, including Vincent van Gogh, to experiment with imitations of Japanese methods
The prints were first published in serialized form in 1856–59, with Hiroshige II completing the series after Hiroshige’s death. It was tremendously popular and much reprinted.
Leon Golub, Mercenaries (IV), 1980
Jackson Pollock, Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, c.1943
Mike Kelley,
More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin, 1987
Whitney Museum of American Art
Kazimir Malevich,
Morning in the Village after a Snowstorm,
Marcel Broodthaers, “Musée d’Art Moderne,
Départment des Aigles, Section des Figures,”
installation at the Städtische Kunsthalle,
Düsseldorf, 16 May‐9 July, 1972
Georgia O’Keeffe, Music—Pink and Blue, II, 1919
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Arthur G. Dove, Nature Symbolized No. 2, 1911
The Art Institute of Chicago
Jeff Koons,
New Hoover Convertibles,
Green, Blue;
New Hoover Convertibles,
Green, Blue; Double‐Decker,
1981–87
Whitney Museum of
American Art
Joseph Stella,
New York Interpreted: The Voice of the City,1920‐2
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
Art Institute of Chicago
American Realism (Ashcan School)
This painting has had a profound influence on American popular culture, emulated over and over again. Here Hopper captures the night time effect of manmade light. The exact angle and shadows produced are a very careful study of this artificial light that would not be visible in day. The dull colors draw attention to the lady in red at the center of the painting. This painting may have been inspired by Van Gogh’s sinister Night Cafe.
Depicted scenes of modern life that suggested isolation, alienation, and abandonment. Spare realist style was characterized by solid forms, sober brushwork and tight compositions, shows four people as a study in loneliness and boredom, seem as cold as the fluorescent light that bathes them and as empty as the streets and stores outside. The viewer is positioned in the street as spectator and one that shares in their condition.
- In opposition to Regionalism’s optimistic images, Hopper’s social realist painting presents a more realistic view of life in America
- Urban realism
- Image that evokes a national mind-set
- Rather than historically specific scenes, more generalized theme of overwhelming loneliness
Amedeo Modigliani, Nude, 1917
Marcel Duchamp,
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
Jackson Pollock, Number I, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mark Rothko, Orange and Tan, 1954
National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.
Pierre Soulages, Painting, 1953
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Tachisme
Independent Group, Parallel of Life and Art,
Institute of Contemporary Art, London 1953
Anish Kapoor, Part of the Red, 1981
Kroller‐Muller Museum, Otterlo, NL
Antonio Canova, Perseus, 1804‐8
Daniel Buren, Photo‐souvenir: “Peinture‐
Sculpture,” work in situ, at the Sixth
Guggenheim International Exhibition,
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1971
Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987
Marsden Hartley
Portrait of a German Officer, 1914
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Gertrude Kasebier,
Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1902
The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Henri Matisse,
Portrait of Mme Matisse/The Green Line, 1905
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen,
Denmark
Otto Dix, Pragerstrasse, 1920
In 1920, at the time of the first international fair in Berlin, Dix exhibited Kriegsversehrte (mit Selbstbildnis) (War Cripples) (with Self Portrait), a frieze of ‘broken faces’ in the street, amputated, disfigured, blinded. Prague Street and Die Skatspieler (Skat Players), both painted in 1920, resemble this work which is all the more emblematic as it was seized and probably destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. It depicts weakened men with artificial limbs, horrific scars and grafts, and the grotesque world of veterans some of whom have been reduced to begging and others exhibit their wounds as proof of their bravery during the war. In Prague Street, their infirmities are emphasised by their nearness to a woman in a tight pink dress with a dog. There are wigs, corsets and artificial limbs in the shop window. A wooden hand holds a stick. The painting is balanced between neutral precision and satirical distortion and is not without political allusions. Near the legless cripple on a skateboard, Dix has pasted a tract or leaflet marked ‘Juden raus!’ (Jews out!). War veterans’ leagues were particularly sensitive to ultra-nationalist propaganda and anti-Semitism was an early component, even before it became Nazi dogma. At the same time, this painting gives us an analysis of German society after the defeat, and foreshadows what it was to become during the inter-war period.
James Rosenquist, President Elect, 1960‐1
Centre Georges Pompidou
Jean‐Léon Gérome, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1890
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
French Academicism
Between 1890 and 1893, Gérôme made both painted and sculpted variations on the theme of Pygmalion and Galatea, the tale recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All depict the moment when the sculpture of Galatea was brought to life by the goddess Venus, in fulfillment of Pygmalion’s wish for a wife as beautiful as the sculpture he created. This is one of three known versions in oil that are likely based on a polychrome marble sculpture, also fashioned by Gérôme (Hearst Castle, San Simeon, Calif.). In each of the paintings, the sculpture appears at a different angle, as though it was being viewed in the round.
When he started to protest and show a public hostility to “decadent fashion” of Impressionism, his influence started to wane and he became unfashionable. But after the exhibition of Manet in the Ecole in 1884, he eventually admitted that “it was not so bad as I thought.”
George Grosz, Republican Automatons, 1920
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio,
Rotolo di pittura industriale (Industrial Painting), 1958
Situationist International
Many of Pinot-Gallizio’s works were industrial paintings. Rather than a small image to be interpreted, these huge canvases were intended to cover a large area. The first of these was the cavern of anti-matter, prepared in 1957 after the formation of the SI. It was composed of 145 meter canvases which were painted by hand or with the aid of spray guns and machines using resins invented by Pinot-Gallizio himself. It was displayed at the Galerie René Drouin in 1959, draped around the gallery and sold by the meter.
The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from anti-authoritarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism.[2] Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.
Pinot-Gallizio was born in Alba, Piedmont, where he became an independent Left councilman and a chemist. In 1955, he met Asger Jorn, with whom he co-founded the Experimental Laboratory of the Imaginist Bauhaus in Alba, which was part of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, in opposition to the return to productivism by others in the Bauhaus school, in particular Max Bill. It was held in Pinot-Gallizio’s studio, a monastery from the seventeenth century, and was attended by such artists as Enrico Baj who experimented with nuclear painting techniques, Walter Olmo, who experimented with musical interventions, Ettore Sottsass, Elena Verrone, and Piero Simondo.[1]
Pinot-Gallizio drew from his background as a chemist in developing new painting techniques. In 1956 he, along with Jorn, organized the First World Congress of Free Artists, at which a representative from the Lettrist International spoke, foreshadowing the foundation of the Situationist International in 1957 by members of both groups, including Pinot-Gallizio. At this conference the Italian artists withdrew from the Laboratory, and after the formation of the SI only Pinot-Gallizio and his son, Giors Melanotte, remained. He helped to make the SI known in the art world with an exhibition in Paris in 1959
Christo and Jean‐Claude
Running Fence
Sonoma and Marin Counties, California
1972‐1976
Max Weber, Rush Hour, New York, 1915
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes,
Sacred Grove, 1884‐89
Art Institute of Chicago
Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Seated Youth, 1917
Burgoyne Diller, Second Theme, 1937‐38
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Leonora Carrington, Self‐Portrait (The White
Horse Inn), 1936‐37
This painting was virtually unknown until it was shown for the first time at the artist’s retrospective exhibition at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York in 1976. Since then the work has left an unending trail of publicity and commentary, serving as an icon in the growing literature devoted to women surrealist painters.
Sporting tight white jodhpurs, lumber jacket, Victorian buttoned boots, and a wild mane of dark hair, the then twenty-one-year-old Carrington sits on the edge of a blue Victorian chair whose carved arm and feet echo her own elegant limbs. No other furniture exists in this red-tiled room that could be the setting of a dream. And as in a dream, Carrington is surrounded by strange beings: a prancing hyena with three full breasts, and a relic of her child-hood, a large, white rocking horse that floats (without chin and tail) against the wall behind her. The image of small white horse galloping among the distant green trees, surrounded by yellow theater curtains, might be a wishful fantasy of the artist marooned in this strange interior. Or is it a window? This cast of characters might have tumbled out of one of Carrington’s wickedly bizarre contemporaneous stories, in which the image of the white horse often looms large.
Carrington painted this self-portrait, in the literature also entitled “The Inn of the Dawn Horse,” while she lived with the German surrealist painter Max Ernst in St.-Martin d’Ardèche in the South of France from 1937 until 1940. The daughter of an English industrialist, Carrington had spent her childhood in a large country estate, surrounded by animals and devouring fairy tales and Celtic legends. Later she had studied painting at Amédée Ozenfant’s Academy of Art. At a dinner in London in 1937, she had met Max Ernst and followed him to Paris. They then moved to the South where they lived a group of ruined buildings that they had renovated and decorated with mythical animals and birds. The approaching clouds of World War II accentuated the unreality of their idyll. Ernst portrayed Carrington as a plant-woman “The Bride of the Wind.” Carrington placed Ernst in a frozen white landscape in her “Portrait of Max Ernst” (c. 1938). Ernst wears the violet fur coat of a shaman and striped socks, a white horse dripping icicles sits behind him, while another tiny white horse sits in his lantern, instead of a bulb. Both portraits, regarded as companion works, defy interpretations.
The date of this painting has been variously given as ca. 1936 to ca. 1939. However, the artist recently informed this writer, that she painted this work ca. 1937-38, one year before the outbreak of World War II.
Paula Modersohn‐Becker,
Self‐Portrait with Camellia Branch, 1907
German Expressionism
Painted in the artists’ colony at Worpswede after 1899 and although not associated with any group, was in touch with new developments in art and literature through her friendship with with the poet Rainer Marie Wilke (who had been Rodin’s secretary) as well as through a number of visits to Paris. In these she discovered successively the French Barbizon painters, the Impressionists, and then in 1905 and 1906, the works of Gaugin and Cézanne. Her early death has left us only with a suggestion of what she might have achieved by in works such as Self-Portraint with Camellia Branch, there is apparently her understanding of the broad simplification of color areas she had seen in Gauguin, assimilated to an atmospheric, romantic interpretation of personality that shows her roots in German lyrical naturalism and her link with German Expressionism.
Frida Kahlo, Self‐Portrait with Thorn Necklace, 1940
University of Texas, Austin
Mexican Surrealism
Christ’s crown of thorns is here depicted as a necklace for Frida who presents herself as a martyr of sorts. A dead hummingbird on her necklace was a Mexican good luck charm to bring love. The black cat symbolizes bad luck and death, the monkey symbolizes the evil - was a gift from Diego. The butterflies represent the resurrection. After break up with Diego Rivera.
Self-Portrait is similar to traditional Mexican religious images
- This image was painted while they were divorced
- Necklace is allusion to crown of thorns worn by Christ during the Passion
Christ’s crown of thorns is here depicted as a necklace for Frida who presents herself as a martyr of sorts. A dead hummingbird on her necklace was a Mexican good luck charm to bring love. The black cat symbolizes bad luck and death, the monkey symbolizes the evil - was a gift from Diego. The butterflies represent the resurrection. After break up with Diego Rivera.
Self-Portrait is similar to traditional Mexican religious images
- This image was painted while they were divorced
- Necklace is allusion to crown of thorns worn by Christ during the Passion
Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, Sewing the Sail, 1896
Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di
Ca’Pesaro, Venice
Gerhard Richter, Shot Down, 1988
from the series 18 October 1977
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun
and Moon, 1913 (dated 1912 on the painting)
Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept: The End of
God, 1963
Gallerie dell’Ariete, Milan
Spatialism
Richard Serra, Splashing, 1968
Gordon Matta‐Clark, Splitting, 1974
Conceptual Art / Anarchitecture
During the 1970s, Matta-Clark made the works for which he is best known: his “anarchitecture.” These were temporary works created by sawing and carving sections out of buildings, most of which were scheduled to be destroyed. He documented these projects in photography and film. Although he made interventions into a former iron foundry in Genoa, Italy, in 1973, his first large-scale project has been defined as Splitting (1974). To create this work, Matta-Clark sawed two parallel slices through a nondescript wood-frame house in Englewood, New Jersey, and removed the material between the two cuts. In addition, he cut out the corners of the house’s roof, which were subsequently shown at John Gibson Gallery in New York. He made similar gestures in some of his photographs, cutting the actual negatives rather than manipulating individual prints.
Lyubov Popova, Stage design for The
Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922
Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
Erich Heckel, Standing Child, 1910
German Expressionism (Die Brücke)
Heckel was a more restrained artist than his colleague Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His emaciated figures sometimes suggest a Mannerist formula rather than any strong sense of inner conflict.
Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind I: The
Farewells, 1911
Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1951
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein‐Weistfalen,
Dusseldorf
Le Corbusier, Still Life, 1920
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Street, Berlin, 1913
Die Brücke (The Bridge– linking “all revolutionary and surging elements”). Imbued with the persuasive spirit of Arts and Crafts and Jugendstil, they rented an empty shop in a workers’ district in Dresden. Heavily influenced by Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch.
Additionally, Kirchner was influenced by Albrecht Dürer and the painting of Seurat as well as Goethe’s color theory.
Can be thought about as a development from Kirchner’s earlier street scene in Dresden in 1908. The earlier version is derivative from the arabesques of Art Nouveau and Edvard Munch, the latter derives its jagged and fractured form from Cubism. Cubist form and Fauvist color, and above all a Germanic emotional vibration that give the scene an intensity unlike anything in France at the time.
Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait
of Pope Innocent X, 1953
Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a 1953 painting by the Irish artist Francis Bacon. The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X painted by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez in 1650. The work is one of a series of over 45 variants of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.[1] The picture was described by Gilles Deleuze as an example of creative re-interpretation of the classical.
When asked why he was compelled to revisit the subject so often, Bacon replied that he had nothing against the Popes, that he merely sought “an excuse to use these colours, and you can’t give ordinary clothes that purple colour without getting into a sort of false fauve manner.”[2]
Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X. Although Bacon avoided seeing the original, it remains the single most influential painting on him, and its presence can be seen in many of his best works from the late 1940s to the early 1960s.
In Bacon’s version of Velázquez’s masterpiece, the Pope is shown screaming yet his voice is “silenced” by the enclosing drapes and dark rich colors. The dark colors of the background lend a grotesque and nightmarish tone to the painting.[3] The pleated curtains of the backdrop are rendered transparent and appear to fall through the representation of the Pope’s face.[
Oskar Schlemmer,
Study for Triadic Ballet, 1921‐23
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Frédéric Bazille, Summer Scene, 1869
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Kazimir Malevich,
Suprematist Composition: White Square on White, 1918
Morgan Russell,
Synchromie Cosmique, 1915
Munson‐Williams‐Protor Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York Synchromism
Louis Comfort Tiffany, Table Lamp, c. 1900
Max Klinger, The Abduction, from the portfolio
The Glove, 1881
German Symbolist
Student of Arnold Böcklin; evinced a sense of fantasy that influenced Surrealists; inspired by Goya
Taken from a ten-suite etching series called “The Glove,” The Abduction represents one more episode in the nightmare of a man fetishistically obsessed with a glove.
These pictures were based on images which came to Klinger in dreams after finding a glove at an ice-skating rink. In the leitmotivic device of a glove—belonging to a woman whose face we never see—Klinger anticipated the research of Freud and Krafft-Ebing on fetish objects. In this case, the glove becomes a symbol for the artist’s romantic yearnings, finding itself, in each plate, in different dramatic situations, and performing the role that we might expect the figure of the beloved herself to fulfil. Semioticians have also seen in the symbol of the glove an example of a sliding signifier, or signifier without signified—in this case, the identity of the woman which Klinger is careful to conceal. The plates suggest various psychological states or existential crises faced by the artist protagonist (who bears a striking resemblance to the young Klinger).
Joan Miró, Still Life with Old Shoe, 1937
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ernst Barlach, The Avenger, 1914
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915‐23
El Lissitzky, The Constructor (Self‐Portrait),
1924
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid, 1782‐5
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
English Enlightenment
Josiah Wedgwood, the famous manufacturer of ceramics directly inspired by ancient vases unearthed in Italy, wanted to commission a work from Wright. The poet William Hayley served as adviser to his friend Wright in this affair. At Wedgwood’s request, Wright painted The Corinthian Maid, based on a tale recounted by Pliny the Elder. A young Corinthian woman, Dibutades, in order to retain a memento of her betrothed from whom she was about to be separated, traced the outline of his shadow cast upon a wall.
Wright specialized in drama of candlelit scenes
Through its effects of restraint and lighting, Wright’s scene comes across as a kind of pagan, ancient-style.
One of his few history paintings.
Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1909‐10
Fauvism
Commonly believed to be inspired by Greek vase painting; considered the culmination of his early explorations in form and content.
The motif is first used in Joy of Life although there the figures revolve in a more literally illusionisitic depth. In The Dance, the colors have been limited to an intense green for the ground, an equally intense blue for the sky and brick red for the dancers.
In this work, the arcadian work of earlier painters have been transformed and transported into the 20th century, while retaining their original sense of magic and mystery.
Edvard Munch, The Dance of Life, 1900
Symbolism
William Hogarth, The Death of the Countess
from the series Marriage‐à‐la‐Mode, 1743‐5
National Gallery, London
Max Beckmann, The Descent from the Cross,
1917
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Max Beckmann’s Kreuzabnahme (Descent from the cross) presents an unflinching look at bodily suffering—a timely topic in the midst of a seemingly never-ending war. Multiple perspectives are combined to focus the eye on Jesus’s oversize corpse, his pale flesh covered in bruises and sores, with coagulated blood pooling around the gaping black holes of the stigmata. His emaciated arms stretch across the picture and in their rigor mortis still mirror the shape of the cross. Beckmann thinly and precisely applied paint in cold, restrained hues, in contrast to his exuberant brushwork for his prewar canvases.
Beckmann possibly made this painting to answer a challenge posed by curator Gustav Hartmann to create a modern work as powerful as medieval German art, which they had viewed together in Frankfurt (along with works by Italian, Flemish, and German Old Masters that significantly influenced Beckmann’s style). Beckmann, after spending a few years making only prints, had recently returned to painting.
Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, 1929‐36
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910
Jose Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization:
Modern Migration of the Spirit, 1932‐34
Dartmouth College
Marisol Escobar, The Family, 1962
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996
Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853
Sandro Chia, The Idleness of Sisyphus, 1981
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Italian Transavanguardia
Jean Fautrier, The Jewess, 1943
Tachisme
John Flaxman, The Judgment of Paris,
illustration of Homer’s The Iliad, 1793
Neoclassism
Wilfredo Lam, The Jungle, 1943
Joan Miró, The Kiss, 1924
Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses, 1911
Emil Nolde, The Last Supper, 1909
German Expressionism (Die Brücke)
The main pioneer of German Expressionism. As a youth he studied woodcarving and for a time worked as a designer of furniture and decorative arts in Berlin. He spent time studying in Paris in 1899-1900, said he was disappointed by the Impressionists but his color took on a new brilliance following the exposure to their work.
He left Die Brucke after only a year to pursue a more personal form of Expressionist religious paintings and prints.
Among the first of Nolde’s visionary religious paintings was The Last Supper. Figures are crammed into a practically nonexistent space; the compression of the group along with the garish colors heighten the sense of impending crsis until it becomes almost intolerable.
This painting exemplifies the qualities of Nolde’s religious expression in an emotional frenzy that would be excessive were it not so convincing.
Nolde stroked on broad, sweeping flows of incandescent color and transformed his world into an emotional event alive with apocalyptic import.
Walter de Maria
The Lightning Field
near Quemado, New Mexico, 1971‐1977
Arshile Gorky, The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, 1944
Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Arthur Dove, The Lobster, 1908
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Giorgio de Chirico, The Melancholy and
Mystery of a Street, 1914
Jacob Lawrence,
Panel No. 1: During World War I there was a great migration north by
Southern African Americans
from The Migration of the Negro Series, 1940‐41
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.
Social Realism (Harlem Renaissance)
Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) is one of the most prominent and revered American artists of the twentieth century. This exhibition includes seventeen panels from Lawrence’s renowned sixty-panel Migration Series, portraying the flight of more than six million African Americans from the impoverished communities in the rural South to the industrial cities of the North. The panels depict themes of migration including movement, family, labor, segregation, struggle, and hope. An American epic told through vivid patterns and colors, The Migration Series is a masterpiece of narrative painting, the first work produced on this subject. Capturing racial ruptures of the day, Lawrence chronicles the quest of people in search of greater economic and social justice.
Dedicated himself to the depiction of black history, documents the exodus from the rural south to urban north based on his parents own personal history. Boldly abstracted style with simple shapes and bright flat colors suggest the influence of Cubism and African-American folk art, purposely meant to communicate in a direct and vivid fashion.
- Panels published in November 1941 Fortune magazine, later shown in Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery
- At 23 years old, Lawrence became the first African-American artist to gain acclaim from whites in segregated New York art world
- Highly influenced by Alain Locke and Aaron Douglas
- Discussed major social issues of the day
- Depicted black history through narrative painting series
- 60 panels which chronicled the great 20th c. exodus of African Americans from rural
South to urban North
- Lawrence’s parents part of this exodus as was he
- “I was part of the migration, as was my family, my mother, my sister, and my brother…I
grew up hearing tales about people ‘coming up,’ another family arriving.”
• Train station filled with black migrants streaming through portals labeled with northern and Midwest cities
Vincent Van Gogh, The Night Café, 1888
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781
Detroit Institute of Arts
Joseph Beuys, The Pack, 1969
Staatliche Kunstammlungen Kassel, Neue
Galerie, Germany
Social Sculpture
The Pack exudes the chaotic and dynamic energy which Beuys considered essential in order to bring change in society. Twenty-four sledges, resembling a pack of dogs, tumble from the back of a VW van. Each sledge carries a survival kit made up of a roll of felt for warmth and protection, a lump of animal fat for energy and sustenance, and a torch for navigation and orientation. Beuys commented: ‘This is an emergency object: an invasion by the pack. In a state of emergency the Volkswagen bus is of limited usefulness, and more direct and primitive means must be taken to ensure survival.’
This strongly autobiographical work refers directly to Beuys’s plane crash over the Crimea during the Second World War. He often described being rescued by a band of Tartars who coated his body with fat and wrapped him in felt. Whether real or mythical, the story shows the symbolic importance of these materials in Beuys’s mind. It also suggests a fable of death and rebirth in which Beuys is purged, perhaps of his wartime guilt, and brought back to life by a nomadic people.
Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, 1906
Marlene Dumas, The Painter, 1994
Francisco Goya, The Parasol, 1777
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931‐32
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
James Abbott McNeill Whistler,
The Peacock Room, 1876‐77
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
Surrealism
The Surrealists were greatly influenced by Freud and the science of the time. The painting refers to a dream, perhaps, the soft watches are an unconscious symbol of relativity in space and time.
Allegory of empty space in which time is at an end, watches are visited by ants and a fly as if they were decaying, despite the watch being made out of metal. Impossible landscape, perfectly possible in the dream world, which DeChirico had originally conceived of as metaphysical painting. Surrealism presented dreams, so personal that often times the audience was unable to communicate with the piece.
- Probed deeply erotic dimension
- Studied writings of Freud and von Krafft-Ebing
- Invented what he called the “paranoiac-critical method” to assist his creative process
- Paranoiac-critical method – sane person cultivates ability of paranoiac to misread
ordinary appearances and become liberated from shackles of conventional thought
- Aimed to materialize images of concrete irrationality with fury and precision
- Idea of soft watches originated from meditating on a plate of Camembert Cheese
- Head is self-portrait – symbolizes obsession with masturbation
Georges Braque, The Portuguese (The
Emigrant), 1911
Romare Bearden
The Prevalence of Ritual: The Baptism
1964
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution , Washington, D. C.
Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911
Fauvism
Matisse carries the principle of the single, unifying color much further than in Harmony in Red. The studio interior is described by a uniform area of red.
By the time this was painted, the Cubists had been experimenting with the organization and contraction of pictorial space for some five years. It was probably a consequence of analytic cubism that he simplified his organization to a rectangular frontality.
A form of geometric simplification in which objects were flattened and frontalized, but there was never a degree of fragmentation, of shifting and titled planes, that in the works of the Cubists proper created the sense of constantly changing vision on the part of the spectator.
Mark Rothko, The Rothko Chapel,
Houston, TX, 1965‐66
Julian Schnabel, The Sea, 1981
The Saatchi Collection, London
Jean‐Honoré Fragonard, The Secret Meeting
from the series The Progress of Love, 1771‐3
The Frick Collection, New York
Gilbert and George,
The Singing Sculpture (“Underneath the Arches”), 1969
British Conceptual Art
The Singing Sculpture (1969), Gilbert & George appeared dressed in business suits with their faces covered in bronze powder, and, using staccato and puppetlike gestures, they sang and moved to the accompaniment of a recording of the Depression-era song “Underneath the Arches.”
With these irreverent and insouciant activities as well as their later artistic endeavours, Gilbert & George sought to question—among other things—the fetishization of the art object. They claimed their entire lives as art.
Raoul Hausmann, The Spirit of Our Time (Mechanical Head), 1919
Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
Edward Kienholz, The State Hospital, 1966
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Claes Oldenburg, seated in The Store, 107 East
2nd Street, New York, 1961
Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928‐29
Belgian Surrealism
In this painting Magritte investigates the meaning of images and language. The pipe is not a pipe - representation is not reality - even the words lie.
- Dreamlike dissociation of image and meaning
- Disruptive shocks
- Subverts viewer’s expectations based on logic and common sense
- Reveals danger of relying on rationality
- Trompe l’oeil – trick of the eye
- Briar pipe
- Caption contradicts the obvious
- “This is not a pipe.”
- Discrepancy between image and caption challenges assumptions underlying reading of visual art
- Wreaks havoc on viewer’s reliance on conscious and rational mind
- Inspired by de Chirico
John Baldessari, This Is Not To Be Looked At, 1968
Duane Hanson, Tourists, 1970
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Vito Acconci, Trademarks, 1970 (detail)
One of the more thoughtful and articulate artists of his generation, Vito Acconci began producing conceptually-driven performances in 1969 with Following Piece. In that work, he randomly followed strangers around New York City until they went into a non-public space. Since then he has often explored the relationship between the artist and viewer, challenging the very nature of the artistic experience.
In another group of works, Acconci tests the question: “How do I prove I’m concentrating on myself? I do something to myself (attack myself).” In Rubbing Piece (1970), he sat in a restaurant and rubbed his arm until it bled to see if viewers were more likely to approach him if he made himself vulnerable. In Trademarks, Acconci again puts his body to the challenge. Sitting naked in a gallery space, he bit different parts of his body in an attempt to reach as much of it as possible. His motive was “to move into myself–move around myself–move in order to close a system.” He then applied printer’s ink to the bites and made imprints of them, thus literalizing the idea of the artist as the maker.
Henry van de Velde, Tropon, advertising poster,
c. 1899
Art Nouveau
One of the most influential figures in all the phases of Art Nouveau was the Belgian artist, trained as a painter who produced, as early as 1890, completely abstract compositions in typical Art Nouveau formulas of color patterns and sinuous lines.
For a time he converted to Neo-Impressionism and read widely the scientific color theory (Chevreul). He soon abandoned this direction in favor of Symbolism and Gauguin, and attempted to push his experiments in symbolic statement through abstract color expression.
Ultimately, Van de Velde came to believe that easel painting was a dead end and the solution for contemporary society was to be found in the industrial arts.
Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 1998
Tate Gallery, London
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the
Side of My Face), 1981
American Feminist/Conceptual
Donald Judd
Untitled, 1967
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored…), 1990
Whitney Museum of American Art
Shirin Neshat, Untitled (Rapture), 1998
Joseph Cornell, Untitled (The Hotel Eden), 1945
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Alexander Rodchenko,
Untitled advertising poster, 1924
Jasper Johns
Untitled, Painted Bronze (Beer Cans), 1960
Shigeko Kubota, Vagina Painting, 1965
Fluxus
(Nam June Paik’s wife)
Shigeko Kubota (久保田 成子 Kubota Shigeko?) (born 1937) is a Japanese-born video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who lives and works in New York City.[1][2] Shigeko Kubtoa’s career was most prominent in the 1960s and 1970s when the Sony Portapak was just beginning to gain popularity among artist and activist circles. Kubota is known for constructing sculptural installations with a strong DIY aesthetic, which include sculptures with embedded monitors playing her original videos. She was a key member and influence on Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centered around George Maciunas, having been involved with the group since witnessing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and subsequently moving to New York in 1964. ubota was deemed “Vice Chairman” of the Fluxus Organization in 1964, a somewhat superfluous title given by Brecht.
Shigeko Kubota’s video and sculptural works are mainly shown in galleries – though her use of the television is synonymous with other video artists of the 1960s who made experimental broadcast programs as a move against the hegemony of major networks.[4] Shigeko Kubota is known for her contribution to the expansion of the field of video into the field of sculpture and for her works addressing the place of video in art history.
Midori Yoshimoto writes that Kubota’s Vagina Painting, which is her most explicit work about gender in art, was poorly received by her peers involved in Fluxus, similarly to ways in which Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann’s performances were considered ‘un-Fluxus’ because of their strong emphasis on feminine subjects. There is also interest in the overshadowing of Kubota’s career by her husband Nam June Paik’s as an issue of the gender biased art world.
Vagina Painting was performed at the Perpetual Fluxus Festival in New York in July 1965.[15] [16] In the performance, Kubota assumed a crouching position over a sheet of paper on the floor with a brush affixed to the crotch of her underwear and painted abstract lines in blood red paint.[17] The work is often cited[18] as a female rejoinder to Jackson Pollock’s action or drip paintings and to Yves Klein’s use of the female body as a painting tool in his Anthropometrics of the Blue Period (1960) in which female models covered in blue paint imprinted their bodies in white paper on a floor. The work has been associated with feminist art, although Kubota has not publicly expressed if she considers the work feminist or not.
André Derain
Turning Road, L’Estaque
1906
Fauvism
Encouraged by Matisse to proceed with his career as a painter in 1899. Derain was a serious student of the aty of the museums, a man who despite his initial enthusiam for the explosive color of Fauvism was constantly haunted by a concept of painting more ordered and Classical in a traditional sense.
The meticulous reiteration of large color areas, foreground and background, and the abruptly foreshortened space, serve the purpose of delimiting depth. The brilliant synthetic color is an accomplished arrangement of harmonies and dissonances, excellently coordinated by the architecture of bridge and buildings.
In 1906, he became friends with Picasso and was drawn into proto-Cubism. He was one of the first to discover African art and develop an interest in primitivism.
Edvard Munch, Vampire, 1902
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950‐51
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Odilon Redon, Vision,
plate 8 of In the Dream, 1879
Art Institute of Chicago
Jean Dubuffet, Volonté de puissance (Will to
Power), 1946
Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, 1963
Tate Gallery, London
Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From?
What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897‐98
Daniel Buren, Within and Beyond the Frame, 1973
Edouard Vuillard,
Woman in Blue with Child, 1899
Willem de Kooning, Woman, I
1950‐1952, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Abstract Expressionism (Gestural Abstraction)
Exaggeratedly summarizing the entire history of female idolatry and suggesting that he was lampooning traditional female stereotypes. Influenced by prehistoric sculptures of fertility and the toothy smiles of modern commercial sex goddesses. Woman lacks the natural beauty of traditional academic art.
* Although rooted in figuration, displays sweeping gestural brush strokes and energetic application of pigment
* Jumbled array of slashing and agitated patches of color
* Ferocious-looking woman, staring eyes and ponderous breasts
* Toothy smile – Inspired by an ad for Camel cigarettes
Woman, I is the first in a series of de Kooning works on the theme of Woman. The group is influenced by images ranging from Paleolithic fertility fetishes to American billboards, and the attributes of this particular figure seem to range from the vengeful power of the goddess to the hollow seductiveness of the calendar pinup. Reversing traditional female representations, which he summarized as “the idol, the Venus, the nude,” de Kooning paints a woman with gigantic eyes, massive breasts, and a toothy grin. Her body is outlined in thick and thin black lines, which continue in loops and streaks and drips, taking on an independent life of their own. Abrupt, angular strokes of orange, blue, yellow, and green pile up in multiple directions as layers of color are applied, scraped away, and restored.
When de Kooning painted Woman, I, artists and critics championing abstraction had declared the human figure obsolete in painting. Instead of abandoning the figure, however, de Kooning readdressed this age-old subject through the sweeping brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, the prevailing contemporary style. Does the woman partake of the brushwork’s energy to confront us aggressively? Or is she herself under attack, nearly obliterated by the welter of violent marks? Perhaps something of both; and, in either case, she remains powerful and intimidating.
Wilhelm Leibl, Women of Dachau (Bavaria)
or Three Women in Church, 1882
Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852, reworked
1855‐1863
Faith Ringgold
Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? 1983
Gustave Klimt, “Choir of Heavenly Angels” from
the Beethoven frieze, 1902
The Secession, Vienna
Vienna Secession
Translation of Art Nouveau to the founding of the Vienna Secession in 1897
Already well established as a successful decorative painter and fahsionable portraitist
Also influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and Aubrey Beardsley
Also formed by a study of Byzantine mosaics
Interested in highly erotic scenes
