For our last class together, we visited the Colby Museum. I really enjoyed this exercise, especially how it served to wrap up our time together and everything we have learned in this course. Each one of my classmates had such insightful comments about a wide variety of works, which showed me just how much we have covered over the course of the semester. I especially enjoyed talking about the works in the contemporary art wing. To me, those works (as mostly non-representational or abstract works) have more space for personal interpretation, so I loved hearing what people had taken away from them! Many thanks to everybody who contributed that day!!
Author: Charlotte Epker (Page 1 of 3)
On May 6th, we started class by looking at Pop Art. One common subject in pop art was mass media objects such as advertisements or references to consumption. Take, for example, Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup Cans. The variety of soup flavors and the widespread consumption of the food made it a perfect subject to be produced in many variations and tell a story of mass consumption in America. We then moved to minimal art, where the artist’s goal was to make themselves as absent from the work as possible. We discussed Richard Serra’s work outside of the Colby College Museum of Art and how it fit into the values of minimal art. We ended class by considering two other works within the Colby Museum’s collection – both by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.
In class on May 1st, we began by wrapping up our discussion of Surrealism. We looked at the work by Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, taking time to discuss how this work was a reflection of her own identity, as well as sources of inspiration. I had not known that Frida Kahlo was a Surrealist (though she would deny this classification – as her paintings reflect her own reality), so it was interesting to learn about a female Surrealist artist! In discussing her sources of inspiration we covered the impact of folk art in her artistic process, which strays from the traditional impact of high art.
We then moved on to considering the further plunge into abstraction, with works such as De Stijl’s Composition en Rouge Blue et Jaune (Composition with red, blue, and yellow). Abstract works like this one use reduction to achieve their artistic goals. After looking at works from Europe, we shifted to American art – looking at works by American Abstract Expressionists.
In class yesterday, we continued to study the different Avant-Garde movements of the 20th century. We began by returning to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a radical work that can be viewed as a precursor to the Cubist movement. Cubism can be seen as divided into two phases, first, analytic cubism, and the later synthetic cubism. Analytic cubism focuses on reducing elements of art, including color, depth, light, shadow, brushwork, line, and, perhaps most crucially, form. The recurring theme across different avant-garde movements is the artist’s intent to shock viewers, which can especially be seen in the case of Futurism. We then moved through some examples of Dada art, finally ending with Surrealism. We considered The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí. Surrealists were fascinated with representing what they saw as the unconscious or repressed feelings. In Dalí’s work, the melting or soft watches serve as an indicator of the distortion of time associated with the dream space of the unconscious. We also see the inclusion of ants in the painting, which was a recurring motif in Dalí’s paintings.
In class, we wrapped up the Post-Impressionism lecture by looking at the work of Paul Gauguin. In his paintings such as The Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), Gauguin aimed to represent an inner feeling or experience, using bold colors to convey these feelings. We moved on to Synthesism, which aims to pull inspiration from the mind and attach feelings to images. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is an example of a symbolist work, as it provokes feelings of fear and anxiety. We then moved into the art of the early 20th century, specifically focusing on fauvism and expressionism. In fauvism, artists used bright colors straight from the bottle in a way that demonstrated how color could be applied arbitrarily. We see this in Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), where the color is not true to life but instead aims to capture the enjoyment of life.
Yesterday in class we looked at works from the Post-Impressionism movement. There were 2 main tendencies within the movement, one emphasized form, while the other emphasized personal expression. The overarching trait of Post-Impressionism was color. We began by considering the work of Paul Cézanne, who often made series of the same landscape, capturing his familiar view of Southern France from different angles. We took note of how Cézanne applied paint to the canvas, which he did in a painterly style. The brushstrokes are visible and take on a repeated pattern of straight lines. Through this style of application, the canvas becomes flattened. As opposed to the previous Impressionists who sought to make their works dissolve into a lightness, Cézanne, and other Post-Impressionists, focused on the reduction of natural forms to be as solid and simple as possible.
This recorded lecture focused on Impressionism. Key features of the impressionist movement include visible brushstrokes and an emphasis on light as a fundamental feature in the works. There was also a desire to capture the feeling of modern life. We began by looking at the works of Édouard Manet. In Manet’s works, we get a sense of the flatness that came with many Impressionist paintings. We can see this flatness in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, especially in the sizing and placement of the woman in the background. Her large size does not align with how far she is intended to be placed back, creating a sense of flat space. We later moved on to the works of Claude Monet, an artist who focused on painting en plein air. The shift to painting en plein air moved artists out of the studios and outside, opening up opportunities for them to paint exactly what they saw before them at a specific moment.
In class on Monday we covered Realism. The key idea of Realism was for an artist to put onto the canvas what they see in straightforward reality, thus producing a realistic rendering of the world around them. We spent a chunk of time considering Jean-François Millet’s The Sower. In his work, Millet paints things that are visible to everyone in life, producing many images of field workers and peasants. His paintings highlight the labor of the working peasant class and show the importance of their work. The colors in the painting are dark and earthy, almost carrying a grainy feel. This is something we saw in many examples of Realism.
Today was the recorded lecture, which wrapped up the previous class on Neoclassicism and then transitioned to Romanticism. In the Romantic period, we saw a new dominance of “exotic” subject matter. The exotic nature of these new subjects was not intended to make the viewer think, as had been the goal in the previous periods, but instead to make you dream. There was a push to appeal to the senses, instead of intellect, and provoke the viewer to feel the emotions of the scene. Every element of romantic works helped contribute to the conveying of emotions from the work to the viewer, from composition to color. The first example of Romanticism which was given was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s, Grande Odalisque. An odalisque is a woman from a Turkish harem, which taps into the exotic interests of the time. The goal of the artist is not to depict a female body that is true to life, as the body proportions and features of the odalisque figure appear to be slightly distorted. She is said to have too many vertebrae, her feet are small, and her body is unnaturally curved. Overall these features do not convey accuracy to the human body, but instead a feeling of dreaminess.
In this class, we discussed Neoclassicism, the artistic movement that aligned closely with the values of the Enlightenment movement. These values included reason, logic, and morality. These three values greatly influenced the work of neoclassical artists. During this movement, which is a reference to “new” classics, we see a revival of Greek and Roman classical art. We can see this, especially in the use of classical forms. Classical forms convey a feeling of transporting back to a previous time when humanistic values were important, as well as the political ideas of a republic and democracy.
One of the most exemplary neoclassical works is Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of Horatii. The composition of the painting especially follows the movement’s values of reason and logic. There are geometric arrangements throughout the painting, especially in the positioning of the three brothers and their father. I also found it very interesting how much the solid and upright positioning of the men contrasted with the women who were depicted draped over each other in the corner. While the men maintained stoic faces, the women were depicted as emoting.