Today we discussed Rococo. A period that I think is interesting because of its almost dream-like idealism and escapism. It is characterized by its ornate, playful, and often frivolous style. Artists of this era sought to evoke a sense of grace, elegance, and pleasure in their works, reflecting the values of the aristocracy and upper class. One of the paintings we covered in class is “The Swing” by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It captures the essence of the era with its lighthearted subject matter, delicate brushwork, and intricate detailing. Set in a lush garden, the painting portrays a young woman soaring on a swing, her dress billowing in the air, while a suitor gazes up at her from below. The scene exudes a sense of romance and frivolity, embodying the carefree spirit of Rococo art. At the same time the whole idea of a bodour painting taking prevalence is rather telling of the period.

We talked about Madame de Pompadour, the influential mistress of King Louis XV of France who also played a significant role in shaping the aesthetic of the Rococo period. The portrait of hers we saw in class was in my opinion the most wholistic example of the Rococo period. I read somewhere that Rococo is a classic reflection of who she was as a patron of the arts, which I think is interesting considering that she was the King’s Mistress, and Rococo is about pleasure and non-reality.

Class 24

In class 24 we began by entering the museum together as a keen mean art judging machine. As a class we discussed the our favorite art pieces and why made them interesting to us. My favorite was a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of pine trees and birch trees. Abstracted to the point of no recognition. The colors and subtle lines are close to flowerlike softness which makes sense when it comes to Georgia O’keefe’s paintings which often incorporate flowers, abstracting them to look more like a culmination of beautiful lines than a flower. 

Class 23

In our twenty third class we started discussion by talking to Andy Warhol. He has some surrealism qualities as he has very little artist intervention, but he included outwards facing commentary on the world around him, particularity the rapid industrialization of America instead of expression of the subconscious. Andy Warhol said everyone would have 15 minutes of fame. Then came minimal art with even less artist intervention or presence in the in 1980 art is now avant-garde by nature, Judy Chicago makes her The Dinner Party table with Yonic place settings honoring women artist. Everything becomes up to interpretation of the viewer. 

Class 22

In class today we we started off discussing the nuanced background of Frida  Kahlo and how her mixed heritage influenced her art, she has a Hungarian Jewish father, and an indigenous Mexican mother. We also talked about her mental and physical sides as sh was serviearly disabled at a young age. 

Then moving into purism, we looked at the glass current style of buildings, one example that I plan to visit is the Seagram Building. Then, in post war art, the idea of capturing motion in art is explored from recording motion with the dripping of paint to blurry objects. Positive and negative spaces balance and the weight of colors are delved into as well. 

Today in class we discussed how art has been about representing the world and what we are looking at realistically and how Pablo was at the front of a shit away from that initiative. Cubism is born. It’s the process of observing the forms of an objet from multiple angles and combining all information into one mass. the cubits as a group go to public lectures about the human experience and how that experience is made up of constant change. And everything is affected by your experience and influenced by specific biases applicable to you. Cities inspire the cubism movement as well, as they are repetitive in from from block to block you might see the same store twice. This idea is visible in Cubism in the repetition of geometric shapes that are common in cities. Then comes Duchamp who makes art by calling something another thing (calling a urinal a fountain) which generates ready made art and and photo montages or collages. Following, surrealism attempts to capture the subconscious by removing artists intervention in the art as much as possible, or by determining subjects of a piece of art  randomly. 

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.

On Monday, April 15th, we focused Realism. We began our discussion on Realism, by looking at Francisco de Goya’s, The Third of May. The Third of May depicts Spanish civilians during the Napoleonic wars and the struggle they faced by the oppression French soldiers showed. The painting displays a group of Spanish people kneeling or bracing themselves from the emotional intensity and brutality of the war. The focal point of the painting displays a man in a white shirt and bright yellow pants. The man shows a worried facial expression with his hands up in the air bracing for savior. Next, we looked at Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s View of Rome. This work displays a calm scenic view of Rome, contrasting to the many harsh, emotionally intense works displaying war and violence. View of Rome utilizes sweeping brushstrokes with pink and orange colors, as if the sun is setting on the water and a pale blue sky. The reflection in the water creates a soft ambiance for the viewers and illuminates the glow of the sun on the water. I specifically liked this painting, given it is quite different from that of the many violently-emotional works we have looked in during the Baroque and Realism class discussions.

As we continued class, we moved on to look at Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans.  A Burial at Ornans is significant in many ways, but one way in particular is that each person in the painting has a specific role and different roles than the other. Rather than depicting a funeral procession of an upper class party, Courbet displays ordinary people part of either the lower or middle classes. This painting encompasses the meaning and the overall themes of the realism movement. For example, the realism movement accepts the flaws of society and the lower class and ordinary people of the movement, while other eras often portrayed scenes with the upper class and neglected lower and middle class people. We see similar notions with Honoré Daumier’s The Third-Class Carriage, depicting commoners cramped in a third-class train cart.

To finish the class, we focused on photography, including Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s Still Life, William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Open Door, and lastly photos from the Crimean war. All of these works center on Realism and the power behind showing the hardships and reality for ordinary and lower class people at the time.

We covered Pop Art, a movement that involves the incorporation of preexisting popular materials, the recreation of this material (with methods that vary in degrees of intervention) to convey underlying messages involving societal involvement with the art. For Andy Warhol (arguably the most prominent figure of this art movement), his works centered around the relationship between the created popular media and human perception of famous figures (the Marilyn series) and with the mass-produced production of foods (as well as life, in extension). 

Following this, for the first time in this course, we examined an artistic movement that rejects the historical, linear concept of constant bettering of society. This sense of deconstruction is the foundation of a new manner of approaching arts. Instead of putting the highlights on certain leading figures of one movement, which more often than not overshadows the artists that, depending on their identities and the time period, does not have the privilege to work in the arts and garner success. Postmodern arts shift the focus on the variation of identities in the arts, which allows space for voices that historically would have not been heard. Additionally, as there was no more need for an us vs them narrative (between the free world and the communist world), the social landscape also became freer for its inhabitants. Themes, styles, and mediums were more diverse than ever. Installation arts – like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, in which famous female figures were given a spot on “the table”, represented by various works of different mediums, including those that might not be considered “fine arts” – also emerged during this period. We see a separation between the artists and the artwork in terms of the process of creation itself. The focus now is on the philosophical underpinnings, the ideological stance of the work, rather than merely how it might be created.

We started this lecture discussing neo Plastic works, notably Piet Mondrien’s Composition en Rouge, Bleu et Jaune. This artist was also the first person to articulate the values and elements that would go on to define this movement. Working with a completely reduced color palette and content, we saw Mondrien’s full focus on the idealized balance of the composition, which stems from the radical and eutopic belief that everything in the world had an organic, underlying logic, and we can access it with the help of art. We see the influence this belief had most clearly within architectural works. Bauhaus is a German art school, first emerged in 1919, which operates with the form-follow-function, less-is-more mindset. Dominating works such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and the American industrial buildings is a sense of striving towards pristine progress and modernity.

After the war, there was a distinct shift in the capital region of artistic works, from Paris to America, with the works of artists like Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky or Willem de Kooning starting gaining attention from the art community. Present in these artists’ (or more specifically, Pollock’s) work is the suggestion of the very process of artistic creation, leading to what would be called action paintings (or gestural abstraction). In these works, the process of creating themselves is part of the work. Other important elements are the usage of biomorphic forms, the uncertainty of space and distortion of foreground/ background. There were distinct tendencies that differed artists from each other: those that created gestural abstraction artworks and those that made chromatic abstraction artworks. One immensely important chromatic abstraction artist is Mark Rothko, whose way of applying paint creates a work that carries dimensions and a sense of development, just through the way it was perceived under certain conditions.

With the instability inherent in the contemporary social and political state, we saw an emergence of a form of art that, for the first time in history, was created with an aim to reject progress. The Dada movement comes from the recognition of the societal human of the destructive power of progress. We examined the Hugo Ball performance, which highlights the nonsensical nature of what is represented and what is representing it.  There were usage of texts within paintings, the works created were random, violent, and non-representational. Artists used a variety of mediums in manners that diverge completely from how they were used in past periods. This is apparent in, but not limited to, works of Marcel Duchamp, who coined the term readymade to indicate external materials which are placed in a structure with minimal modifications, or Max Ernst’s 1 Copper Plate 1 Zinc Plate 1 Rubber Cloth 2 Clippers 1 Drainpipe Telescope 1 Piping Man, which is simply an assemblage of materials that evoke certain emotions that could be felt by an individual. We saw the beginning of the interest in Freud’s concept of the human’s unconscious mind.

This was the foundation for the development of early Surrealism. Of course, we most frequently heard of Surrealism through the analysis of Dali’s Persistence of Time, which centers the distortion of time, space and figures organized in a highly chaotic composition. However, in contrast to how Dada uses its objects and colors arbitrarily, Dali gave a purpose to his work. In this sense, each element of the painting, including the name of the piece, goes together to create a coherent message. Oftentimes, these messages evoke a sense of emotional aspects, as they delve into the unconscious realm of the psyche. Works like The Gift by Man Ray, or Object (Luncheon in fur), which brought forward distinct sensations of awe and disgust, are clearly surrealist for this reason.