Author: Nora Callanan (Page 1 of 3)

The Post-Modern Era marks a distinct break in the linear progression of art. Previously art movements were defined by being greater or do something newer than the generation before them. Now art is almost entirely about personal expression, artists are not trying to best those who came before them and are free to create art however they please. One of the most important artists of the post-modern era was Basquiat. Basquiat began as a graffiti artist with his iconic tag “SAMO@”, which was a play on the phrase “Same old…”. He would place his tag in different areas of SoHo which was the neighborhood where most art galleries were located in New York. He originally started off working in a group with 2 other graffiti artists but eventually started branching out and working on his own. This angered his partners and led him to abandon graffiti and switch to painting.

His Horn Players really highlights his graffiti roots in the way it is done a very rushed and messy style, similar to how graffiti is done. Basquiat draws a lot of inspiration from jazz music in this work. He is attempting to pay homage to a genre that black artists created. The work is improvisational just as jazz musicians often improvise while playing. He includes the names of 2 famous jazz musicians – Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. He also includes the word ornithology, the study of words, multiple times, as a reference to Charlie Parker’s nickname “Bird”.

Today’s lecture focused on art post-World War II and particularly looked at the new art scene developing in New York City. After the Americans became the liberators of Europe during WWII, there was a shift in the center of the art scene from Paris to New York. The new styles we see being born in this era are abstract expressionism and action painting or gestural abstraction. Jackson Pollock is the pioneer of action painting with drip technique. His style is the natural evolution of surrealism. He would meticulously drip and splatter paint onto a canvas on the floor. He had immense control over the paint, despite the wild look of the painting.  Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 is one of his greatest works and the viewer can clearly see how it is a record of a certain activity. The focus of the paint in the center and less paint, as it approaches the edge of the canvas, highlights the control Pollock had over the paint.

A contemporary of Pollock is William de Kooning who became a major abstract expressionist after immigrating to America. His Woman I is a part of a larger series of portraits of women. Similar to Pollock his works are all about gesture and how the paint was applied. With Kooning’s works, we see the total abolishment of figure and ground. The same attention is given to the figure as is to the ground and they feel on equal plains.

The senseless violence and seemingly random destruction of World War led to the creation of art that emphasized randomness and chance. The first post-war art movement was Dadaism and began among a group of artists in Zurich. Jan Arp was a member of this Zurich group and created the distinctive early Dada work, The Entombment of Birds and Butterflies. Arp created this work by cutting up pieces of paper and dropping them on the ground. Arp then took the arrangement of the pieces of paper as they randomly fell on top of each other and hired a carpenter to cut these shapes into wood. The title comes from the fact that Arp could slightly make out the abstract shapes of birds and butterflies, but otherwise, the work is entirely abstract. Arp is beginning to explore making art which was more about ideas than purely appearance.

The French artist Marcel Duchamp furthers the concept of art being about ideas with his ready-made. Ready-made where sculptures were made out of mass-produced objects that could be bought at a store. The artist elevates an object from an everyday item to art, simply because they deem it to be so. Fountain was Duchamp’s first ready-made, technically an assisted ready-made because he made some changes to the original object. The work is made from a urinal, which Duchamp rotated and signed with the fictional name “R. Mutt”. The title of Fountain is meant to be a satire on fountains traditionally being grand, ornate decorations for city centers in Europe, but here being something painfully mundane.

Fauvism and Expressionism were two of the dominant art movements in the early 20th century. Matisse was a leader of the Fauvist movement, which was heavily inspired by Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Eastern and African art because they valued its “primitive” nature which emphasized emotion. Matisse and other Fauvists were interested in using color in abstract ways. Matisse’s Femme au chapeau is pure color with every aspect of the figure and even the background being done in vibrant, abstract blocks of color. Matisse uses a very blotchy, unblended, rough application of paint. The application of colors is very arbitrary, a section is a certain color because the artist chose to put it there. This abundant, over-the-top use of color, is meant to expressive and playful.

Matisse further explores those themes in Le Bonheur de vivre. This painting shows a very traditional subject, a scene of leisure amoung an idyllic landscape. It is Matisse’s style and arbitrary use of color which makes the painting remarkable. The painting is abstract because it does not capture reality, but is clearly expresses emotion. He is trying to create a scene which captures his own joy of life. The pallette feels very warm and inviting, as do the lounging women. The composition of the work contributes to the expression of joy.

In today’s lecture, we discussed Post-Impressionism, and how this movement evolved out of and differed from the true Impressionist movement. A key figure in the shift from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism is Cézanne. Monet and other Impressionists were fascinated with light and how different lighting changed the way we perceived things. All their works have this ephemeral quality because of the focus on light. Cézanne is not like this at all, in his own words he wanted to make art that was “solid and durable”. His style is based on abstraction and reduction – he reduces objects into their most simple form.

These ideas are clear in his Mont Sainte-Victoire series. Cézanne’s series are much different from those of Monet’s who tried to observe how the same scene transformed in different lighting and weather conditions. For Cézanne who lived in the south of France, the seasons did not change much and the landscape would be almost identical throughout the year. This makes the images in his series almost identical – this permanent nature of the landscape is also very different from the fleeting nature of Impressionist scenes. Cézanne is exploring form and color in this series. He uses very harsh, straight brush strokes which greatly flattenens the scene. The paint is applied the same way for objects that are far in the distance and those up close, again flattening the landscape. The viewer can not escape the fact that what they are looking at is paint on a 2D surface, not an imitation of reality.

Today’s lecture focused on art from the Impressionist movement. One artist in particular who stood out to me was Manet whose works often combined themes of Realism with the techniques of Impressionism. He also often included harsh critiques of French society in a number of his works to reaffirm his belief that art should be able to the modern world. He studied old masters and would often include references to their works in his art as a way to highlight his message about what art should be. He embodied the French concept of a flâneu which was a witty, intellectual man who would stroll around Paris and observe everyday life.

Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass is meant to be a critique of the use of nudity in academic art being acceptable because it is about figures from a distant past. These paintings with naked women and clothed men, often showing figures from antiquity, were highly popular in the salons simply for their erotic appeal. Luncheon on the Grass critiques this concept by showing a contemporary scene of a naked woman in a Parisian park accompanied by two fully clothed men in modern garb. Manet copies the poses of the figures from nude portraits from the Renaissance. The figures are lit by a very white, frontal light which flattens the canvas. Manet uses very obvious and harsh brush strokes which further distorts the scene. He also does not use perfect proportions or perspective. All these features in addition to his critical statement of the salons in this work are a complete rejection of the academic style.

In today’s lecture, we discussed Realism, which as the title of the movement suggests was about capturing real life. It focused not on idealized grand figures, but on everyday, often working-class or rural people, and aimed to elevate them to the height of the grand portraits and history paintings of the past. This art movement was heavily influenced by the ongoing revolutions and social tensions in Europe as well as the rapidly growing industrialization.

I hallmark work of this period is Millet’s The Sower, which is a large portrait of a peasant sowing seeds in a field at dawn. The man’s face is covered by his hat and the showdown from the rising sun behind him. His face being obscured is meant to make him a representative of peasants as a collective, not just a specific man from a specific town, but all peasants everywhere. Millet himself came from a peasant family and in his art career expressed great sympathy for peasants, and often aimed to elevate them in his works. He wanted to highlight the labor of the working class, especially in the day of rapid industrialization in France which prioritized machines over humans. Millet wants to remind urban viewers that peasants are the backbone of French society, not machines or industry, and without their labor French society would collapse.

In today’s lecture, we look at a range of works from the period of Romanticism. Romanticism as a movement is defined by a rejection of Neoclassical rationality and authority and an embrace of emotion and Rubanist principles. We looked particularly at the French Romantics, whose works were heavily influenced by the politics so of the time, mainly the rule of Napoleon. Napoleon’s empire shook French culture, not only because they had gone from monarchy to anarchy to empire, but because Napoleon’s conquests into the East created a fascination with these new and “exotic” cultures. This concept, known as orientalism, is seen greatly in Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. The work references and almost imitates Titian Venus of Urbino, a famous work from the Venetian Renaissance. Ingres elongation of the woman’s back and the impossible pose she takes on is similar to Pargmagino’s Madonna with the Long Neck. Further, the face and hair wrap is similar to those seen in Raphel’s work. Ingres is clearly pulling influence from these Renaissance masters to show his knowledge of the arts, but he puts a twist on this. Unlike Neoclassistics who used references to the Renaissance and antiquity to imbue their works with meaning and morality, that is not Ingres’s aim. This work is meant to be dreamy and make the viewer fantasize about these exotic figures and places. It’s sensuality and light-heartedness is almost Rocco. This piece is definitely a transitional work of the Romantic period, as its lack of emotion and linearity is clinging to Neoclassical tradition.

Neoclassicism is an art movement born out of the advancements made during the Enlightenment. This movement came from a collective of people deciding that they wanted to create art that reflected their new ideals of logic and morality. Themes from antiquity, particularly ancient Greece during this period, become the inspiration for many. This is because ancient Greek and Roman art contained examples of politics, morality, and philosophy. They also believed the classical past to have been a time when humanistic values were alive.

Meng’s Parnassus is an early work in the Neoclassicism movement and Mengs himself was foundational in the creation of this style. In this work, we see the god Apollo on the top of Parnassus, which is a sacred mountain in Greece. Here he is surrounded by the muses since he is the god of music and poetry. Mengs uses a very balanced color pallet with a lot of primary colors, as opposed to the use of pastels in the previous Rococo period. This work is extremely similar to Raphael’s Parnassus in the Vatican. They have the same structured composition with Apollo as the central figure sounded by the muses. Meng’s Apollo is based on the Apollo Belvedere to highlight Meng’s knowledge of ancient art. This work is not at all painterly and uses clear, well-defined lines. This is in stark contrast with Rococo art which was often extremely painterly, such as in A Pilgrimage to Cythera. Though the light-hearted topic of the scene is very similar to Rococo art, which highlights this work as a transitional work from Rococo to Neoclassicism.

In today’s class we disscued 18th c. art, particularly the Rococo period in France and the transitional period that followed it. Rococo art began with the death of Louis XIV and the subsequent succession of Louis XV. Under the new king, the nobility gained back much of the power they had lost under Louis XIV and began to move out of Versaille and into Paris. They lived primarily in modest townhouses in Paris which would have plain exteriors, but they paired this with lavish and highly decorated interior. The decoration style is quite similar to that of the Palace of Versaille with lots of gilding and ornate furnate, but these spaces are much more intimate and clearly meant to be functional and adaptable. These homes were called “hôtel particular” and mark a shift in French archetetcure from an emphasis on the facade to the interior.

The nobility also became major patrons of the arts in France commissioned works to decoarte their lavish townhouses or the walls of salons. These works depicted primarily aristocratic individuals, and often in nature. Watteau’s A Pilgrimage to Cythera is a hallmark piece of this era. The work done in a very painterly style with the heavy blending which makes the figures and the background mesh together in a dreamy haze. Watteau also uses pastel colors, such as light pinks and yellows, which pop against the cool green landscape, but are not necessarily very vibrant or bold. Watteau uses light to draw the eye to certain features rather than bright colors.