Today for our final class we took a stroll around a few wings of the Museum, focusing mostly on 20th and 21st-century art. I think it was cool to see what works my peers found interesting, specifically folks who don’t talk in class a whole lot. For more abstract pieces like Pollock’s Masks, it was cool to hear people’s takeaways and get a close-up view of the work.
Author: Spencer Krysinski (Page 1 of 3)
Today was our last lecture for the semester, and we really picked up the pace to finish the material.
We started by finishing our discussion of Modernist Art, starting with Pop Art and moving through Minimal and Conceptual Art. Pop art started in Great Britain, drawing inspiration and appropriating figures and characters from popular culture. In America, artists like Andy Warhol took everyday items and tabloid images and elevated them to a higher artistic status by reproducing their likenesses on silkscreen prints to comment on the societal ills of consumerism and the emotionally detrimental nature of celebrity. Warhol’s techniques eliminated any trace of his handiwork, a model borrowed and built upon by Minimalist artists later in the 20th century. Minimalist artists like Richard Serra were primarily concerned with playing with forms in space — often in a confrontational and precarious manner. Many minimalist artworks, like Serra’s 4-5-6 outside of our Museum, are site-specific and exist to inform and contemplate motion around a space. Conceptual Art is a more perfunctory affair, in that it places a greater emphasis on the idea of an artwork as opposed to its final product.
The ideas and philosophies of modernism began losing steam around the 1980s when the Deconstructivist philosophies of Foucault, Derrida, and Sartre were adopted by artists in droves. Deconstructivists contended that no text (i.e. work of art) could have any definite meaning, and is in a state of constant flux depending on its presentation and who is experiencing it. As artists began to abandon the ideas of a linear progression of art, artists began to create referential works that centered around certain ideas and issues. Anselm Kiefer, for example, created multimedia ‘paintings’ that harped on the trauma and psychological reconstruction of Germany following the Second World War. Other artists, like Martin Puryear, crafted abstract and simple sculptures meant to call into question the distinction between fine art and handicraft. In essence, art since 1980 has seen a panoply of individuals and groups making art about things and questions they are passionate about.
Today we touched on a handful of important styles and movements that were born in the wake of the Second World War. The mass exodus of artists and creatives following WW2 from Europe to America made New York the new center of the art world. The first truly American art movement to sweep the world was Abstract Expressionism, a movement split into gestural and color-field abstract subgroups. Gestural Abstract Expressionists, like Pollock and de Kooning, used frenetic and energetic brushstrokes to create abstract compositions that reflected both the actions of the artist and the mental states of their painters. Conversely, color-field painters filled canvases with thin layers of vibrant hues, typically shades of the same color, to explore the emotional environments that colors themselves created. This is not to say that the arts fell off completely in Europe. From de Stijl to Purism, European art took on a muted and intellectual form following the Second World War. Perhaps disillusioned with the march of progress and the rise of brutal totalitarian regimes, Western European artists strove to democratize art by championing functionalism in all aspects of design. For Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Le Corbusier’s Purism, buildings and objects were stripped down to their most simple geometries and colors, albeit with different interpretations of what this reductionism fundamentally entailed. De Stijl artists, for example, drove to uncover the hidden mathematical code of life itself, whereas Bauhaus artists, many of whom held Communist sympathies, sought to create goods and homes for a more equitable and less consumeristic world.
Today we finished up our discussion of prominent pre-WW1 artistic movements and began to tackle the heavy hitters after WW1.
We started with the Young Ladies of Avignon, going into more detail about the layers of abstraction present in the painting. Professor Plesch noted that the painting itself was a revolutionary step away from the mimetic nature of art that defined the Western canon since the early Renaissance, which I thought was pretty interesting because the painting itself doesn’t feel very special, at least to me.
After that, we touched on the second important movement in which Picasso was involved — Cubism. Cubism existed in two forms, analytic and synthetic. The former refers to the philosophical exploration and artistic experimentation of space and form, while the latter refers to the composition of representational objects through simple geometric shapes viewed from various angles.
We then discussed Dadaism across Europe and America. Dadaism began in earnest with Hugo Ball, a German poet whose poems were intentionally nonsensical and ridiculous to highlight those same qualities in modern society. Interestingly, I had to perform a poem of his for my German class a few weeks back, and I had a great time! Dadaism, though universally thought-provoking and abstract, employed varying degrees of political commentary. Duchamp’s New York Dada was concerned primarily with questions of aesthetics and art broadly, as we saw with his, Fountain. German Dada, however, is fervently political and criticizes the vacuity of the post-war German state through assemblages and collages (dubbed photomontages to sound more mechanistic and manufactured).
We closed by briefly surveying Surrealism, a movement that owes its existence to the theories of Sigmund Freud. Inspired by the Austrian Psychoanalyst, Surrealists plumbed the annals of their unconscious minds through automatic artistic practices to pull imperialistic, believable, dream scapes.
We started today’s lecture with a quick discussion about Paul Gaugin and his works in both Brittany and in Tahiti. When he was working in France most of his works and a Post-Impressionistic flavor, relying on color and simple geometric forms to create simple, dream-like, and totally personal images like his Jacob Wrestling the Angel, which shows a small group of women experiencing a shared vision of Jacob and the Angel as evidenced by the arbitrarily-chosen yet striking red ground. His later works, ones done amidst the lush tropical Polynesian landscapes, draw from various artistic traditions like those of the Tahitians to create painted collages of icons and symbols that describe Gaugin’s personal and artistic philosophies.
Informed by the color and forms of Gaugin and van Gogh, the Fauves set out to take the application of color to its logical end. In his Femme au Chapeau, Henri Matisse employs radiant primary and secondary colors to outline the shape of a well-to-do lady — a classical subject with a unique, abstract application of color. Similarly, in his painting The Joy of Life, Matisse paints a classical bacchanal utterly consumed by color. Ignoring conventions of space and perspective, the painting is an abstract, yet deeply pleasant, symphony of color and line that is meant only to be a sensuous and delightful image.
German Expressionism would build off of this revolutionary application of color and use it to criticize the vacuity of early 20th-century German culture. The two main groups that dominated this period, die Brücke and der Blaue Reiter, were greatly inspired by the works of Nietzche and Freud respectively. Ernst Kirchner’s Street, Dresden uses off-putting greens contrasted with a bubble-gum pink street to imbue the modern German cityscape and its inhabitants, with a revolting and repulsive aire. Reiter painters, like Franz Marc, sought personal solace in nature and depicted natural forms in striking, abstract rays that appear shattered on the canvas.
Today we talked about post-impressionism and its two-pronged departure from impressionism through form and personal expression.
Paul Cezanne, a native of Aix-en-Provence, made a name for himself through his reductionistic and relatively abstract depictions of his native landscape. Concerned more with shape over light, Cezanne’s flat and uniform brushstrokes imbue his landscapes with a flat planarity that reduces the provincial landscape to a symphony of colorful polygons that are given depth and perspective through the properties of color. Though perhaps not as privy to the science of color as his contemporary Seurat, who didn’t mix paints on the canvas but rather placed individual dots of color for our eyes to mix (Pointillism), his paintings certainly capture the lush and verdant atmosphere of provincial France.
Van Gogh’s paintings are also richly colorful, but his choice of palette reflects the messages and ideas his works were trying to convey. In his Potato Eaters, van Gogh renders a destitute family of coal miners in a dark, earthy, color palette that reflects not only their living and working conditions but also the family’s deeper connection to the land in general, as opposed to the haughty Parisian urbanites. Similarly, van Gogh subverts the properties of warm/cool colors and their ability to render space in his Night Café. Instead of having the warmer colors closer to the front of the picture plane and cooler colors in the back, he flips the orientation of the two with a large cool green pool table standing on a strong diagonal at the center of the painting and large dark redd-burgundy walls framing the space. This inversion serves to flatten the image and create a general sense of unease within the space, that might reflect van Gogh’s personal sense of unease given his regularly poor mental and physical health.
Our second online lecture started with examples of early photography, and more generally the advent of the medium. We didn’t touch on Pictorialism, but Professor Plesch did note that the photos were important references for Realist painters trying to capture exactly what they saw in their everyday lives. We also touched on the popularity of photo portraiture and photojournalism in America as well.
We then stepped away from realism and into Impressionism with the work of Manet. A well-read man and noted flaneur, Manet sought to capture the change and vitality of mid-1800’s Paris with an equally modern art style. Though he took thematic cues from the old masters, Manet’s intentionally skirts their naturalistic and balanced construction. Employing bright colors and quick, thick brushstrokes, Manet’s space and figures are rendered flatly within the picture plane in a manner totally anathema to the huaghty curriculum of the Academy. In essence, Manet’s style was made for his period.
Other impressionists, like Monet, also captured the dreamy world they saw. Interested primarily with light effects, Monet’s paintings render the impressions of land and cityscapes. Painting primarily outdoors, Monet painted one color at a time, and allowed the paints to blend indirectly in our eyes and on the canvas, creating a twinkling, shimmering effect to many of his paintings.
This past Monday we were back in the classroom talking about Realism. This was an art movement that I really had no prior experience with, and I had no idea that Impressionism was essentially a branch of Realism.
Spawned in France at the start of the Second Republic, realist artists were tired of classically informed arts and chose to represent the ever-changing world as they saw it. We looked at the works of Millet and Courbet, two painters who turned to their bucolic roots to magnify and elevate the lives of provincial folks. Unembellished and unidealized, early Realist paintings depict figures and settings as plainly and truthfully as possible with contrasting overtones of timelessness and change. Millet’s The Sower is at once a life-like depiction of a provincial peasant sowing seeds at dawn and at the same time a glorification of the peasantry at large that affirms their role as the backbone of French society even in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
From here we went on to look at other French paintings that captured the beauty and simplicity of the province through artists like Bonheur, and realism applied to the urban landscapes through the cartoons and paintings of Honore Daumier. We ended by crossing the pond to discuss the prominent American Realists, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Homer, like Millet, used his bucolic and nostalgic “genre scenes” to grapple with the changing political landscape and comment on America’s ‘loss of innocence’ following the Civil War. Eakins, on the other hand, was more concerned with capturing the changing landscapes of America and the activities of the growing middle class.
This is coming a bit late (I initially didn’t know we needed to record a journal entry for our online class) but last week we had a long-form seminar video covering Romanticism.
I think stylistically this is a really important and visually interesting movement. I like how it grew alongside Neoclassicism and that both movements share an interest in the sublime — this intangible, overpowering reaction to the world around us.
Romantic paintings, more so than any other period we’ve looked at thus far, have a lot to say about the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist. Romantic paintings capture the emotion of important events and political movements, but not in a very uniform way. German Romantic paintings look very different from, say, English ones because German painters were reacting to and engaging different social/intellectual stimuli than the British were.
Today we started our discussion of Neoclassicism. We didn’t confine our discussion to any particular region, instead, we tracked the ideological and cultural development of Neoclassical ideals across Europe, bouncing from Rome to England and France.
We spent a lot of time talking about architecture today, which makes sense given that Grecoroman designs first made their way into the artistic dialogue of the Brits through their Grand Tours of Italy where they were exposed to humongous Roman monuments. This artistic development, of course, blossomed alongside and was greatly informed by Enlightenment ideals of empiricism, rationality, and divine symmetries. I wonder, to what extent, the Industrial Revolution also played a role in the development of Neoclassicism, particularly in Britain.
Across Europe, particularly through institutions like the Royal Academies of France and Britain, history painting became a means to materialize and tastefully represent the moral and ethical beliefs of antiquity. Ideas like bravery, sacrifice, and devotion permeated both contemporary histories (a la The Death of General Wolfe) and traditional histories (David’s The Oath of the Horatii) in a very austere and almost tangible manner.