Claude Ledoux

Bird's Eye View of the Town of Chaux

1800

- Urban Art

- City was made to be practical, functional because of location of salt

- Imposing control over the salt

- Drawn in France 

Ingres

Large Odalisque

1810

- Women from a harem

- Referencing the Venus of Urbino

- Crumpled sheets, untouchable sort of woman

- Three extra vertebrae and disproportionate body

- No evidence of Modern Paris or the Modern Age - Academic painting, academy and student of David

Friederich

Abbey in the Oak Forest

1810

- Nationalistic ideals of the Romantic period

- Sublime ideas: size of people in reference to canvas, color blending

- The artist tells us how to react to this work

Millais

Ophelia

1850

- Classic British LIterature, Shakespeare subject

- Pre-Raphealites: did not like Raphael did not aspire to his art like their contemporarys

- Raphael was too ideal and perfect

- Highly detailed, interested in Truth and everything received equal detail and attention

- Used a model

- Painted the atmosphere by not focusing on the composition and arbitrarily combining the background

Manet

Olympia

1860

- Looking directly at the viewer, reclining nudes 

- Courtesan: wearing shoes in bed, neck tie, black cat, crumpled sheets

- Open toward the viewer

- In control, dominant more than submissive compared to Large Odalisque

- No longer interested in the subtle modeling and coloring characteristic of Titian

- Saying that the Venus no longer exists, were replaced by courtesans

- Sort of rubbing something into the publics face, public saw this as moral depravity, animalistic sexuality 

Monet

Boulevard des Capucines

1870

- Plein air painting, took off because of invention of the paint tube

- Modern area of Paris, paved boulevards, new buildings, mingling Bourgeoisie, walking around taking in pleasures of the modern world

- Snap shot of Parisian modern life

- Impasto: able to see the actual texture of the paint brush, not blending it 

- Idea that as cities get larger, anonyminity of the subjects increases

Renoir

Ball at the Moulin de la Galette

1870

- Moment in time, impression

- Impressionism 

- Artists gathering place, people who he would have associated with

- Arbitrarily cutting off of the people he paints, slices of life

- Main belief: to be true to the life that they lived painting it accurately

- Social iconography of the people he shows us

Horta

Tassel House

1890

Brussels

- Art Nouveau: mimicking nature, organic, something that was not conceived before hand, could be something found in nature

- Free flowing, floucny, flowery, S-curve

- Creating natural flowing elements using cast iron

- New material, not a factory aesthetic though

- Interest in organicism gets repeated throughout Europe

- Modern materials, modern building techniques

Rodin

Walking Man

1900

- Representation of human form in bronze, sculpture

- Body proportions are accurate, Neo-Classical

- Striding forward, studying the typical striding forward statues that go way back in art history

- Playing with form, fragmenting the human body

- Looking at the past, Michelangelo's "Saint John" 

- Looking backward at very specific references

Kirchner

Street, Berlin

1910

- Expressionism: rejecting ideas of beauty/harmony, primacy of the artist's feelings and mood, incorporating violence and the grotesque 

- Grotesque, makes the viewer uncomfortable

- Distorted version of the world

- Protesting against the bureacracy, the materialist

- Showing two prostitues in Berlin

- Very angular

- Large brustrokes

- Primitivism inspired by African masks 

Picasso

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

1900

- Abstraction: extreme angles, painted at all angles simultaneously

- Still humans even though deconstructed humans

- Primitivsm: african masks, departure from illusionsim

- Inconsistent portrayal of their faces

Boccioni

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

1910

- Representation of bodily form/movement

- Futuristic, idea of motion and movement in object

- Dynamism in the shapes

- Striding forward, moving into future, deconstructed anatomy

- Futurism: emphasis of technology, rise of industrialization, mechanical and impersonal with no identity

- Suggestive of different forms of industry

Mondrian

Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue

1920

- Primary colors, spiritual reference, purity

- De Stijl movement: The Style

- Universal value: no idea of country in this work, any culture can understand it

- Pure Plastic art: all art polar coexistence; attempt to create universal beauty and desire for aesthetic expression of oneself 

Rietveld

Shroder House

1920

Utrecht

- De Stijl movement

- Universality, not referencing nationalism

- Using the primary colors similar to Mondrian

- Large contrast to surrounding homes

- Very close to where the movement began in Netherlands

- Modern materials, modern building techniques

Picasso

Guernica

1940

- Contemporary of war, direct comment on war

- War is not glorious, civilians sacrifice themselves

- Horror of war versus grand nobility of generals

- Spanish civil war

- Formal elements: painting, black and white, cubist

- No bombs, German planes, visceral outcry of human pain

- Fragmentation of objects

- Human contortions

Pollock

Lavender Mist

1950

- Non-representational, not trying to represent something

- Abstract expressionism

- Gestural abstraction

- Both spontaneous and choreographed

- Rhythmic drips, splatters and dribbles of paint 

Kooning

Woman and Bicycle

1950

- Abstraction, non-representational

- Series of paintings of Women

- Gestural Abstraction

- Sweeping gestural brushstrokes, energetic application of pigmant

- Figures suggest fertility and satirize the traditional image of Venus

- Image part of an interaction with the artist, not a preformulated image

Oldenburg

Lipstick Ascending Caterpiller Tracks

1970

- Political statement, anti-war, mocking idea of glory of war

- Vulgarity of war, phallic symbol

- Vietnam war

- Pop-art, kinetic

Smith

Die

1960

- Cor-ten steel: outside oxidizes

- Simple mechanical object 

- No more meaning than an object itself

- Rejection symbolism and illusionsim

- Objecthood, concrete tangibility

- Autonomous object that has no connection with art, yet size demands attention, scale is something that in itself communicates self-importance

Lin

Vietnam Vetern's Memorial

1980

D.C.

- Student

- Minimalist

- Site-specific

- Set display into landscape, awareness of the growing # of names

- Austere, simple

- Cuts into the landscape violently but the ground has healed around the cuts

Hanson

Tourists

1970

- Replicas of tourists you would find 

- Banal, real people

- standing on a sidewalk, directly resemble a NY sidewalk

- Work of art because artist says so, gaze upon ordinariness part of your own life 

- Surrealist

- People are recongizable but still only represent an idea, no story line

Smithson

Spiral Jetty

1970

- Salt Lakes

- Salt is again controlling the landscape and the work

- Functionless piece of art, who is seeing it from above?

- Built in location that would have only been seen by workers

- Far from touristy areas and martini sipping monkeys

- Environmental art: chose the concept to show nature's enduring power over humankind's inability to conquer it. 

- Spiral because discovered the molecular structure of the salt crystals were in spiral form