Art History
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Modern 1
Modern 2
modern world (2)
See also artcyclopedia.com/ for more images in hi-res
Fauves
Henri Matisse / The Joy of Life (also - the green stripe, harmony in red) 1913
expressionism "the artist's emotional attitutde towards
himself and the world" janson 770
Fauvism was a short-lived movement, lasting only as long as its originator,
Henri Matisse. The Fauvists believed absolutely in color as an emotional
force. They astonished viewers at the 1905 Salon d'Automne: the art critic
Louis Vauxcelles saw their bold paintings surrounding a conventional sculpture
of a young boy, and remarked that it was like a Donatello ``parmi les fauves''
(among the wild beasts).
see also Albert Marquet, Andre Derain, Vlaminck, Braque, Dufy, Friesz, Manguin,
Kees Van Dongen and Charles Camoin.
"Henri Matisse was born in 1869, the year the Cutty Sark was launched.
The year he died, 1954, the first hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll. Not
only did he live on, literally, from one world into another; he lived through
some of the most traumatic political events in recorded history, the worst
wars, the greatest slaughters, the most demented rivalries of ideology, without,
it seems, turning a hair. Matisse never made a didactic painting or signed
a manifesto, and there is scarcely one reference to a political event - let
alone an expression of political opinion - to be found anywhere in his writings.
Perhaps Matisse did suffer from fear and loathing like the rest of us, but
there is no trace of them in his work. His studio was a world within the world:
a place of equilibrium that, for sixty continuous years, produced images of
comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction..."
image
and bio link art archive
http://www.1001.org/
Abstraction I
Kandinsky / Composition VII
p 776 image/bio/info
Though Kandinsky was born in Russia, he spent most of his creative years
in Germany, and would head up the second German Expressionist group, known
as "Der Blau Reiter". Kandinsky and his followers were more spiritually
inclined than the Die Brucke group (and had close ties with a new sect of
religious philosophy, known as theosophy). Kandinsky believed that colors,
shapes and forms had an equivalence with sounds and music, and sought to
create color harmonies which would be purifying to the soul. It is easy to
see the impressionistic influence in his very earliest works. As his work
progresses, it becomes increasingly abstract, until there is no longer an
image defined by the various shapes and colors. By this time, Kandinsky had
decided that the idea of creating paintings which were pictures of the representational
world was no longer necessary. He felt that society was paving the way for
a new, more spiritual age. Instead of focusing on the material aspects of
life, he felt his paintings could help prepare people to see the spiritual,
non-material world. Kandinsky is one of the first (if not the first) artist
to create completely non-representational paintings. http://www.eyeconart.net/links.htm#artarchives
see image/bio link art archive image
and bio link art archive http://www.1001.org/
DIE BRUCKE german expressionism
The beginning of Expressionism took place in Germany, around the time of
the first World War. In 1912, Kirchner became the leader of a group of artists
who called themselves "Die Brucke". He and the other artists sought
to build a " bridge" between Germany's past and future. They felt
that the art of the current establishment was too academic and refined to
retain any degree of expression, so they instead found inspiration in medieval
German art and primitive African sculpture.Since their primary concern was
the expression of deeply felt emotions, they would also transform their negative
feelings about the war onto canvas. Kirchner achieved some fame during his
lifetime, and was fortunate to maintain a number of collectors for his paintings.
With the beginnings of WWII, however, his work was denounced (as well as
his compratriots) as "degenerate art", and confiscated from museums.
He became increasingly depressed by the war and took his own life.
see BAUHAUS design p 873 see Nolde, Kirchner, Kokoschka
Cubism
Picasso / Les Demoiselle d'Avignon 1907
image/bio/info p
779
see also
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910)
Le Repas Frugal (1904)
Guernica (1937)
One of the most influential art movements (1907-1914) of the twentieth century,
Cubism was begun by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and Georges Braque
(French, 1882-1963) in 1907. They were greatly inspired by African sculpture,
by painters Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Georges Seurat (French,
1859-1891), and by the Fauves.
In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an
abstracted form. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed
the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat
nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone." link
Cubism
Highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created
principally by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between
1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface
of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective,
foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories
of art as the imitation of nature...link
see
analytic, synthetic cubism
Futurism
Balla / Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash 1912
p 783 image/bio/info
Futurism celebrated the machine - the racing car was heralded as the triumph
of the age - and early futurist paintings were concerned with capturing
figures and objects in motion. In [his] Girl Running on the Balcony, Balla
attempted to realize movement by showing the girl's running legs in repeated
sequence. Other paintings, such as Dog on a Leash, got to grips with the
problem of recreating speed and flight by superimposing several images
on top of each other.
"If Futurism embraced the present, it also rejected the past. Whereas
De Chirico looked back nostalgically to the remote Mediterranean tradition
of art and humanism that had transformed nineteenth-century Italy into a moribund
museum, the Futurists iconoclastically attacked this same tradition with verbal
and pictorial proclamations. By affirming so emphatically, in the words of
their literary leader, Marinetti, that "a roaring motor car, hurtling
like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace," the
Futurists hoped to wrench Italy from her languid, retrospective dream of an
antique and Renaissance past into the shrill, dynamic realities of the industrial
present. To accomplish this aim, they needed to develop a style as aggressive
and conternporary as their new urban environment. For this, Cubism was essential. image/bio/info
Fantasy
De Chirico / Montparnasse Station1914?
image/bio/info
"The case of Giorgio de Chirico is one of the most curious
in art history. An Italian, born in 1888 and raised partly in Greece - where
his father, an engineer, planned and built railroads - he led a productive
life, almost Picassoan in length; he died in 1978. He had studied in Munich,
and in his early twenties, under the spell of the Symbolist painter Arnold
Böcklin, he began to produce a series of strange, oneiric cityscapes.
When they were seen in Paris after 1911, they were ecstatically hailed by
painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Éluard..." image/bio/info
see also Chagall
George Bellows / Stag at Sharkey's 1909
Realism
p 789 image/bio/info
"Although George Bellows did not exhibit with The Eight, by the
time of the exhibition his name was often linked with theirs as a follower
of Robert Henri and one of the "youthful apostles of force, who express...the
rush and crush of modern life, the contempt for authority." image/bio/info
Mondrian/Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue 1921
Abstraction II
image/bio/info
"Mondrian wanted the infinite, and shape is finite. A straight line
is infinitely extendable, and the open-ended space between two parallel straight
lines is infinitely extendable. A Mondrian abstract is the most compact imaginable
pictorial harmony, the most self-sufficient of painted surfaces (besides
being as intimate as a Dutch interior). At the same time it stretches far
beyond its borders so that it seems a fragment of a larger cosmos or so that,
getting a kind of feedback from the space which it rules beyond its boundaries,
it acquires a second, illusory, scale by which the distances between points
on the canvas seem measurable in miles.
" 'The positive and the negative are the causes of all action ... The
positive and the negative break up oneness, they are the cause of all unhappiness.
The union of the positive and the negative is happiness.' The palpable oneness
of the solitary flower or tower, being subject to time and change, had to
give way to the subliminal oneness of a vivid equilibrium."
- From David Sylvester, "About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948-1997"
Surrealism
Magritte / The Treason of Pictures (This is not a Pipe) 1929 image/bio/info
Surrealism is a style in which fantastic visual imagery from the subconscious
mind is used with no intention of making the artwork logically comprehensible.
Founded by Andre Breton in 1924, it was a primarily European movement which
attracted many members of the chaotic Dada movement. It was similar in
some respects to the late 19th-century Symbolist movement, but deeply influenced
by the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Jung.
The Surrealist circle was made up of many of the great artists of the 20th
century, including Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Joan
Miro, and Rene Magritte. Salvador Dali, probably the single best-known Surrealist
artist, was somewhat of an outsider due to his right-wing politics - during
this period leftism was fashionable among Surrealists, in fact in almost
all intellectual circles.
The Magic Realists were American artists somewhat influenced by the Surrealists. surrealism.html
Magritte: The fascinating and challenging images in Magritte's works stem
from revelations of the mystery of the visible world. To him this world was
a more than adequate source of lucid revelations, so that he did not need to
draw on dreams, hallucinations, occult phenomena, cabalism. Nonetheless, preconsciousness
- that is, the state before and during waking up - always played an important
role in his work.Text from "Rene Magritte", by Abraham Marie Hammacher
images
see also Ernst Dali KleeCalder
Kahlo / The Two Fridas 1939
image/bio/info
DADA
Marcel_Duchamp/Fountain 1917
p 798 image/bio/info
see also p 842
see 'readymades'
link
and understandingduchamp.com/
Lawrence Steefel, the art historian with whom Duchamp was perhaps most
frank, was once told by the artist, "I want to grasp things with the mind
the way the penis is grasped by the vagina." Steefel has written: "Seeking
to distance himself from his own fantasies, Duchamp sought a means of converting
pathos into pleasure and emotion into thought. His mechanism of conversion
was a strange one, but essentially it consisted of inventing a 'displacement
game' that would project conflicts and distill excitements into surrogate objects
and constructs without which his mental equilibrium might not have been sustained." Text
from Janis Mink, "Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968: Art as Anti-Art"
see also
Nude Descending a Staircase
see Oppenheim
Expressionism
image/bio/info
see
Dove
Beckmann
AMERICAN_SCENE
image/bio/info
see
Hopper
O'Keeffe
Ab ex action painting
Pollock / autumn rhythm #30 1950
image/bio/info p
813
But people want to know what Pollock’s works mean? This begs the question
of what "meaning" means when interpreting Pollock. Here, I would
suggest, meaning is the sum total of three things:1. what you feel on first
encountering the work,
2. what you can see of the qualities of the work that made you feel as you
did,
3. what you can know about the work’s imagery and intent, and the historical
origins and context from which, and in which, it was created.
The point to stress here is that the first levels of relevant information
in the quest for meaning are visceral and visual, not verbal. These are the
realities that I think have been forgotten in the current "literature" on
Pollock -- and most serious art. Indeed, one must come to the sad conclusion
that for many historians, biographers and critics today, the works of art
are not real as objects -- only the theory of explanation is real. This lack
of empathy -- this inability to share in another's emotions or feelings --
this inability to see, and through perception, to feel through what is actually
there in the art work, but instead to assert only what theory requires to
be there -- makes all too much recent art commentary tendentiously distortive,
unenlightening, and ultimately useless.
What follows applies the method just described in the reviews of the show
and its catalogue, and in the commentaries on specific works.Dr. Francis
V. O’Connor
see also Gorky, Gottlieb, Dubuffet, Bacon, De_Kooning
Color Field
Rothko / Untitled,1949
pg 817
see Houston Museum, later works.
While it is the glowing, ovoid areas of color that the eye first embraces
in a typical Rothko, it is useful to become aware of how they are contextualized
with often dramatically emphasized horizons -- and borders. These divisions
are mostly two, often three (occasionally more). They define a horizon gestalt
between the areas of color; the borders the peripheral limitation of our
normal view of any horizon. We thus float at the center of a prospect that
falls out as below us, before us and above us -- the artist leaving us to
our own associations, but determining within his formal structures, the extent
of the world he wants those associations to inhabit. (Here the structure
of the works of the early 1940s is crucial -- for they remain latent after
1950.) Thus, Rothko's tripartite and quadripartite compositions present a
radical abstraction of the planet in cross-section from below the viewer's
feet up, the internal light of that world provides it welcoming warmth or
abject negation, as befits the artist's moods. At the end of his life, the
last, sad, bipartite images (MRCR 814-831), leave us with a single horizon
between the black of space and the earth's lithic interior -- all place of
human grace on the surface under the sun having slipped away from his despairing
reach.Dr. Francis V. O’Connor
see also
Frankenthaler
Tinguely p 819 THEATRE/PERFORMANCE
Cage p 825http://www.newalbion.com
Late Ab Ex
Kelly / Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, 1966
With his keen eye for contour, Ellsworth Kelly extracts
visual “fragments” from the surrounding world—the sweeping
curve of a Romanesque nave, a crescent moon, a barred window—and
then condenses them into elemental colors and shapes. Although relentlessly
abstract, his forms are anchored to the legible, to details of architecture
or landscape, filtered through the artist’s vision. Early in his
career, Kelly adopted a philosophy of anti-illusionism that would change
the parameters of painting and revise its relationship to sculpture. He
began painting monochrome panels in the early 1950s and has been experimenting
with this composition (or anticomposition) ever since in single and multipanel
formats. With their anonymous, uninflected technique and absence of surface
drawing, these pristine “painting-objects” established a new
relationship between painting and its architectural context. By defining
the structure and shape of each canvas through color—matte, uniform,
and without gestural nuance—Kelly eliminated any figure-ground illusion
and brought painting into the sculptural realm of objects; the painting
itself became the figure, with the wall as its ground.
guggenheimcollection.org
see also Stella
Pop Art
Warhol / Birth of Venus (after Botticelli) mid sixties
p 826 image/bio/info
"Andy Warhol began as a commercial illustrator, and a very successful
one, doing jobs like shoe ads for I. Miller in a stylish blotty line that
derived from Ben Shahn. He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962, when
the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62.
From then on, most of Warhol's best work was done over a span of about six
years, finishing in 1968, when he was shot. And it all flowed from one central
insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience
most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images
that become banal and disassociated by repeated again and again and again,
there is role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of
feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror. Not that Warhol
worked this out; he didn't have to. He felt it and embodied it. He was a
conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity
- the famous image of a person, the famous brand name - had completely replaced
both sacredness and solidity. From "American Visions", by Robert
Hughes
see also
Johns
Lichtenstein
Oldenburg
olden.htm
Rauschenberg
Nevelson
see also OP_ART
Photorealism
p 830
Chuck Close / Big Self-Portrait, 1968
do google image search
see also
Richard Estes
Late Modernism/Contemporary
Kiefer
p 832
Brian Boucher
Over the last three decades, Anselm Kiefer has become internationally celebrated
for imposing, operatic works dealing with the historical, mythological and
literary themes that animate post-war German culture.
http://artchive.com/ftp_site_reg.htm
see also MINIMALISM
see Judd p 849
Earth Art
p 854
Smithson / spiral jetty 1970
spiral_jetty.htm
spiral_jetty/travelogue.html
see also Christo p 855 http://christojeanneclaude.net
Bartlett
Hesse
Environments and Installations
p_858
Hamilton 1994tropos
For "tropos," Hamilton covered the floor of a 5,000-square-foot
factory space entirely with horsehair. The hair, which varied in color from
black to blonde, was sewn in bundles and seemed to gradually undulate – like
ocean waves – across the horizon of the space. What would seem to be
a normal factory floor was in fact also altered by the artist, re-poured
into subtle shifts of elevation. One discovered this only after walking on
and through the horsehair, navigating the now difficult terrain. Hamilton
also made subtle alterations to the light which entered the building, replacing
the transparent windows with translucent, textured glass. This rather restrained
intervention of light and hair immediately focused attention on a solitary
figure situated at the room’s center. Here sat a person at a small
metal desk, day after day, performing the same ritualized task. Smelled before
it became visible, the task was to silently read and burn the printed text
from an entire book, line by line. By walking around the space, charged by
the silent activity of the attendant, visitors would activate a halted, perplexing
audio component. From the perimeter of the room, located outside the windows,
was the murmur of a man struggling to speak. Sounding like ordinary language
and yet garbled beyond sense, this slow speech had the effect of transforming
the empty warehouse into an otherworldly, mental space.
artists/hamilton/card3.html
tandempress www.sculpture.org
see Pfaff
Bueys I like America and America likes Me 1974
http://artchive.com/ftp_site_reg.htm
Beuys certainly inherits Dada's rage at the powers that be and he responds
with Dada's audacity at not remaining subservient to the restrictions that
system would oppress expression with. Dada was an awakening in the form
of a movement—artistic, activist/social, but most forcefully, psychological:
Its artists refused to adhere to the limits of the expected, or the patronized
obligation to entertain and please. Their break was radical in its insistence
on offending. It was a people voicing resistance to a social system that
would prefer decoration to intellectual fervor. Dada sought to undermine,
to question, to reject. Greg Masters
Baldessari
Late Modernism/Contemporary
see Hockney
Wojnarowicz
Gehry p 916
Paik T.V. Cello with Charlotte Moorman 1971
Video p 918
nam-june_moorman.jpg
Kruger It's a Small World 80's
p 922
barbara+kruger
kruger2.html
Sherman p 923
see
contemporary links archive