NEOCLASSICISM

Jacques-Louis David (dah-veed), Death of Marat (Mah-rah)

This painting personifies the sacrifice and believed virtue of the proponents of the first French Revolution. From a tub that Marat was confined to because of a skin condition, he called for the deaths of the bourgeois. Charlotte Corday, tired of his death lists, gained access to his room and stabbed him to death. Shortly after, David paints his friend Marat as a saint and hero in the pose of Caravaggio’s Christ descended from the cross.

(65 in × 50 in) (1793)


Notes:

French Revolution. Contemporary event. Jacobin group--revolutionary politician.
Martyr of revolution heroicized. Skin disease effects not shown; person idealized.

NEOCLASSICISM

Jacques-Louis David (dah-veed),

Oath of the Horatii, which embodied Enlightenment thinking, by directly opposing the excesses of the French nobility in the Rococo. The Neo-classics instead called for restraint, virtue, and idealism, which are all seen in this classical dramatic scene.  

Notes:
Tells a story of Rome (Horati brothers) and Alba battling it out as the city winner. Willingness to die for one’s country. Patriotism over family. Painting of antiquity. Frieze of figures that look like they could’ve been on a Greek vase. Light passing across the picture. Hands and swords meeting is the vantage point and emotional focus. New style. Concept of sacrifice.

ROMANTICISM

Goya, The Third of May

Unlike any painting before it, this masterpiece emotes. This  Romantic scene shows the slaughter of the native Spanish at the hands of the Napoleonic occupational army. Kenneth Clark considered it one of the first Modern paintings because of its revolutionary style (not illustrative), subject (subjective), and intention (social indignation).

(8.5’ x 11.3’) (1814-15)

ROMANTICISM

Gericault, Raft of the Medusa

Typically a beholder of a painting this large would expect it to depict an ancient historical scene that caters to her tastes. This extraordinarily large image, however, depicts a disturbing scene from a relatively current event. As a ship went down at sea, the rich took the life-rafts and eventually cut the poor’s raft loose. The rich were found shortly thereafter, and brought home as heroes… until the poor were saved and told their side of the story, which involved dehydration, death, and cannibalism. Only 15 of them survived. In this image life-sized rotting bodies lie exposed in the face of beholder as the figures at the top try to wave down the ship that would eventually save them.

(1818-9)

Notes:

Contemporary subject: event only 3 years earlier.  This painting is the moment when they see the ship that will save them. Artist studied at a morgue and drowned bodies. Went to the trial. Proto-Romantic--mix of real and unreal. Spectrum of emotion and feeling through physical body.
Bottom left: despair; top right: hope.
Raft in the viewer’s space.
Indictment of the monarchy. Restoration of the French monarchy once the revolution failed.
Sacrifice for liberty...now depravity.

REALISM

Courbet, The Stone Breakers

This image evidences Courbet’s social and political interest in the plight of the poor (they were largely forgotten after the French Revolutions). Here he depicts them with no romantic undertones as worthy of study even amidst their toil. He  painted this brutally rough composition just one year after Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto.

(1849)

Notes:
Non-idealized. Isolated laborers. Portrayed as physically and economically trapped. Disjointed figures. Account abused and deprivation that was a common feature of mid-century French rural life.
Focuses on all types of details, not just faces. Feels more “real.”

REALISM

Manet, Le DeJeuner sur l'herbe

Manet dismantles the beholders expectations of art while breaking many artistic rules in subject and form. Although the image is underpinned by classic composition it gaffs at classical assumptions and content. Manet thwarts those notions by, among other things, his artistic treatment of the nude woman, making her presence more personal and more alarming. ( recently disrobed, staring back at us, and flattened). Furthermore, he emphasizes the flatness and physicality of the canvas by his positioning and posturing of the woman in the background, as well as the bold physicality of the paint.

(1863)

Notes:
Break as many rules as the artist can. Naked woman not a goddess. Direct gaze from the naked woman. Sexuality but non-classicizing. Original title “The Bath.” Distinct color of the women-->2D cut out. No sense of distance. Seeing the paint and method, not just the picture. We don’t live in the ancient world, so what does our modern world look like?

IMPRESSIONISM (Optical Realism)

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (1872)

This artifact showed in the first impressionist exhibit and eventually gave rise to “Impressionism” as the name of one of the most memorable and (eventually) loved art movements in the history of Western art. Monet’s realistic and perceptual emphasis of color, even hue, over line stands on the shoulders of Rubens, Delacroix, Turner and others. The quickness of stroke and immediacy of the scene resonates with the quickness of life that took hold of society during the industrial revolution

REALISM, ROMANTICISM, IMPRESSIONISM

Auguste Rodin The Gates of Hell (1880)

(context for The Thinker and The Kiss)

These gates counterpoint Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. Dante sits above the Inferno deep in thought. The couple Paola and Francesca were initially conceived for it as the sculpture know as “the Kiss” but were later separated from this composition to become their own distinct work.

Notes:
Left unfinished. On it, “The Thinker,” which was Dante. Whole piece a narrative of Dante’s Inferno. Figures emerge from an intangible vat. 3 Shades versus angels at the top; 3 exact matching figures. Contrapposto. Fragmented self. Reuse.

REALISM, ROMANTICISM, IMPRESSIONISM

Auguste Rodin The Thinker

POST-IMPRESSIONISM, POINTILLISM

Seurat, (sur-rah) La Grande Jatte (1884-6) (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of...

To pursue a brighter of the canvas Seurat broke each element down into component colors. This took impressionism in a scientific direction, leaving behind much of the capricious and soft aspects of impressionism. He replaces these with a stoic, linear, classicism that anchors his subjects in unforgettable solitude.

Notes:
How do you make the art brighter?
optical mixture = Put the colors next to each other rather than mix them on your palette
Neo-impressionism
Desired timelessness and classicism
Not spontaneous but very thought out and organized
Layered variety of brushstrokes
Contours and lines
Upper class of 19th century (current discussion of ambiguity of classes)
Figures in the painting don’t react
NOT painted en aire; many sketches ahead of time.

POST-IMPRESSIONISM

Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night (1889)

When Van Gogh painted this, he envisioned a world where God was present everywhere. In capturing that vision in his post-impressionist phase, he loosed art from its mooring in slavishly describing external reality as scientifically observable. Instead he used color and line expressively and cast a vision that 20th century artists could follow into new and unforeseen creative directions.

Notes:

“THE BEDROOM”
“Color has to do everything.”
Color & form have emotional value, not just the content itself.
Simplicity of space. Refuge.
Intimate experiences with the location.
Utopian escape for artists who are wanting to get away to paint.

EXPRESSIONISM, SYMBOLISM

Edvard Munch (monk), The Scream (1893)

Described by Arthur Lubow as “the Mona Lisa of the Modern era”, this searing image expresses the ineffable horrors of suicidal inclinations. Munch ratchets up Van Gogh’s emotional color and line to the level of a psychological drama allowing the viewer to empathize with this waif caught up in the overwhelming sensation.

Note:
Trying to keep himself from hearing the scream.
So misinterpretted as art.
Expressionism: expressing the invisible of how you feel instead of what you see.
Frightens the audience. “Shock artist.”

His mother’s death in his childhood affected his art.
Dehumanized person.
Startling image.
Vibrant colors.
Picture remains incredibly disturbing and horrifying, even though it has been so frequently reproduced.

THE STORM
Internal and external emotion.
Dark colors.
Northern lights.
Demonstrates worry.
Central figure anchors the picture.
Pulling the viewer into the space by using a vanish point & orthagonal lines.

Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life

This is possibly Matisse’s greatest work of Fauvism. “As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. The references are many, but in form and date, Bonheur de Vivre is closest to Cézanne’s last great image of bathers.” (SmartHistory)

(6’ x 8’) (1905-6)

Notes:
Landscape functions as a stage. Figures both at rest and in motion.

Emphasized contours of the women heavily emphasized. Controposed against the curves of the trees.
“doesn’t depict forms that recede in the background and diminish in scale.” Unrealistic scale.
Created from multiple perspectives all at once.
Sensuality 

Pablo Picasso, Guitar (1912-13)

As the first assemblage sculpture, Picasso birthed this form from collage (also invented by Picasso) by playing with the geometry of a guitar (already a sculptural object) as opposed to the time-honored sculptural tradition of sculpting the human body. This form ends up leading the way for future artists to make sculptures about anything and out of anything.

Notes:
sheet metal
Aesthetically understood.
Revolutionary sculpture as not a human body.
Making a sculpture of the essence of a thing rather than that exact thing.

Language of depiction rather than the depiction itself.
S-curves on sides tell us it’s a guitar.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917 / 1964)

He acquired this urinal, flipped the “ready-made,” on its back, signed it with a name not-his-own, and entered it in an art show. This distinctly set idea/concept as primary and set a precedent for removing craft/skill/technique from the necessary qualities of art allowing even this urinal, to begin philosophical discourse as to the nature of art. This direction paved the way for among many other things: pop art, conceptual art, and postmodern philosophy including deconstruction. Art critics and art historians widely consider this most the most influential work of art from the 20thcentury.

Notes:
Purchased urinals, flipped it on its side, and signed it with a fake name.
All art was supposed to be accepted, but this piece was still rejected.
Shiny, curves, porcelain
Transformation of ordinary materials, asking us to see the object in a new way...Makes us ask the question “What is art?” and “Is craft required?”
Does art have to be made by the hand of the artist?
Is art the idea or the concept or the physical object?

Constantin Brancusi Bird in Space (1923)

Brancusi, a student of Rodin, depicts not a bird but, in his words, “the meaning of flight”. In doing so he pushes his materials to their limits in a language of abstraction that was still in its birthing period in Western culture.

When his sculpture first came to NY from France in 1926 it was held up in customs because it was so revolutionary the customs agents wouldn’t believe it was a work of art.

Notes:
bronze that’s highly polished, but limestone pedestal
Neoplatonic
Demonstrates upward, flying movement

Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,Manhattan (1949-1959)

Wright leaves an unforgettable modernist mark on Manhattan with this ahead-of-its time structure (yet reminiscent of the Pantheon). Its’ cantilever-full design utilizes concrete and rebar with techniques that were specifically honed for this structure. The tastefully patterned ramp spirals up around an open atrium to showcase paintings but the structure itself never recedes as its own work of art.
Notes:
Only non-rectangular building.
Spiral museum out of concrete.
Patterns
Open atrium
Pushing the limits of engineering.
Using concrete in new ways.
New concept to actually execute the ideas.
many ramps
Originally called “Museum of Non-Objective Art.”
Hilla Rebay
opposition to European modernists
iconic, great visibility
The museum is itself a piece of art. But should the house of art be neutral?

Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937)

With a saturation bombing, Hitler (at Franco’s request) as a show of strength, annihilated the civilian population of Guernica (a Basque town). The world responded with shock and horror. Picasso did to and expressed the horrors of war as no one had before… in this large grand history-like painting done in his honed language of synthetic cubism. The symbolism is rich and the emotions are raw.

Notes:
Anti-war propoganda
mural @ Worlds fair
War was typically depicted as heroic, but in this scene Picasso contradicts it.
Overtly political painting, a topic Picasso was uninterested in until this time.
100s of preliminary sketches
Sent on an international tour
monochromatic black, white, & gray: dramatic intensity, visual kinetic energy of jagged movement
Horse and bull were common images Picasso used.
Not just 1 exclusive meaning.

Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931) (Illusionist Surrealism)

Following the provoking thoughts of Jung and Freud, Dali uses sharp Renaissance perspective to vividly depict an unforgettable imaginative landscape. The subconsciously inspired painting takes up the space of approximately of a person’s head. In it the beholder might feel like she is staring into a person’s unconscious mind, watching time flop and shapes defy recognizable order. In this scene, rational, logical explanation maintains no hold on reality.
Notes:
attack on rational; irrational just as important
Visual brain teaser/optical illusion
Surrealism
dreamscapes
Landscape doesn’t carry much weight in regards to time.
Things being rendered that is not realistic.
Bugs eating at a time piece.
Tree growing out of manmade block.
rocky coast: Catalonian coast in Northern Spain
One object can be multiple things at once.
Causes and effects
People will interpret it very differently.
Time dilation.
Philosophy: Time that expands and contracts according to our experience.
Clocks are our futile attempt to understand time.

Willem De Kooning, Woman I (1950-2) www.Moma.org

Figuring that this series of Women would not sell, DeKooning made a painting that not even he knew was art or artful. It is gestural, muscular, primal and honest with possibly 80 other paintings underneath it. Although it looks a bit like cubism, this violent image does the opposite. Instead of building up a form from component parts, in an emotive response he deconstructs the female visage with each mark and slash of his brushes until it falls apart. Possibly it prophesies the destructive strangle-hold pornography would soon take on American culture.

Notes:
Classical training-->abstract-->dwelling on the body
Cross over of male gestures and muscles with female body.
Aggressive feel.
Physically layered paints, working until the basis started to fall apart… 60-80 paintings on this one canvas.

Misogynist???
Possibly introduced pornography
Female portrayed as ugly
Redepict the way we understand the body?

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962)

In both of these cases Warhol presented reproduced, common, everyday, accessible images as if they were fine art. He both depicts and creates the attitude, interests, and values of his era. Furthermore, many Warhol images were screen-printed, making them mass-producible, unoriginal, and less expensive. His work has a (two-fold if not more) effect. 1) It frames common life as worthy of aesthetic attention. 2) It dethrones “high art” from being separate from everyday existence.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962) (Also noteworthy: 32Campbell's Soup Cans)

In both of these cases Warhol presented reproduced, common, everyday, accessible images as if they were fine art. He both depicts and creates the attitude, interests, and values of his era. Furthermore, many Warhol images were screen-printed, making them mass-producible, unoriginal, and less expensive. His work has a (two-fold if not more) effect. 1) It frames common life as worthy of aesthetic attention. 2) It dethrones “high art” from being separate from everyday existence.

Notes:
“Why is this art?”
Many individual canvases.
Relocated-->New perspective
Not technical skill.
New location causes us to view it differently.
Advertising “art” wasn’t considered “art.”
What does this time period put value on and view as art? What relates to this current time?
Industrial culture-->art of man made objects
Focus on the ideas rather than on the skills to MAKE the art.
Not technically profound.
CAN this be art?
Rubber stamps<--make the mechanical process easier
The art is justified after the artist is considered important.
Shocking in its time.

Frank GehryGuggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (1997)

Built in the heart of a waning industrial town, this behemoth of a structure, houses expansive galleries of art from the world-class Guggenheim collection. Its style, dubbed “deconstructivism” fragments forms that rise in seemingly capricious, wild, and unpredictable directions. Titanium and other materials cover the eclectically formed exterior, while walkways and glass atriums seem to bring the city and museum into the life of each other.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black and Grey, the Artists Mother  (1871)

Actually having been accused by the most influential art critic of his era to “have flung a pot of paint at the canvas,” Whistler did believe that artists should be more interested in the harmony of the visual elements than in representing the natural world. “Art for art’s sake” sums it up well. Besides the large (ironic) influence of that art critic John Ruskin, Whistler also grew his aesthetic from Japanese prints and the impressionists. In this case he has painted his mother, what should be a tender portrait he initially titles after the paint that makes his mother appear on the canvas.

Grant WoodAmerican Gothic  (1930)

Maybe no other painting could be so recognizably American. With what undertone is this painting describing America? The painting defies interpretation making it a Mona Lisa in its own right. The image was painted just one year after the stock-market crash that lead to the great depression. The unflinching couple stands humble, stoic, hardworking, unmovable.

Notes:
Icon of a nation, U.S., especially small-town America
Model--dentist and sister
Perspective is according to who’s viewing the group represented...possibly over-simplified people group. People can see from it what you want.
Iowa.
Conservative

Homemade
Confrontation with these people.
Man is hard to read
Artist: Isolated childhood
Regionalism =American scene painting = figurative tradition of the Middle West
Time in Paris painting semi-impressionist style
N. Renaissance and European influences brought to his US environment
Background of picture is very geometrical.
Political ideology suggests returning to rural life and ignoring internationalism.

Edward HopperNighthawks (1942)

In an unmistakably American setting, Hopper shows us a place we feel like we have been before. Specifically rendered details fall within vast swaths of barren surfaces. The painting defies exact narrative, which keeps the beholder in the barren space outside the diner. We might desire to go in, to listen, to converse, but we end up feeling as alone and isolated as the figures on the other side of the glass. The painting feels romantic and ideal but ever-so full of isolation.

Notes:
Very present.
Wartime alienation.
The viewer is “alone.”
Outside looking in.
Eerily silent.
No sign of life except for the people in the restaurant.
Height of WWII, which the war might turn either way.
Not a specific street corner or cafe.
Geometric.
Few clues of real life details.
Enough details to know we’ve been there, but that it is not anywhere we have ever been.