ARTH111.2 Flashcards
(92 cards)
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Enlightenment
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The Western philosophy based on empirical evidence that dominated the 18th century. The Enlightenment was a new way of thinking critically about the world and about humankind, independently of religion, myth, or tradition.
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Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927
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John Constable, The Haywain, 1821. Oil on canvas, 4’ 3 ¼” x 6’ 1”.
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Regionalism
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Regionalism A 20th-century American art movement that portrayed American rural life in a clearly readable, Realist style. Major Regionalists include Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton.
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Mary Cassatt, The Bath c. 1892. Oil on Canvas.
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Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963
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Nadar (Gaspar-Félix Touranchon), Eugene Delacroix c. 1855
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Abstract Expressionism
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gestural abstraction Also known as action painting. A kind of abstract painting in which the gesture, or act of painting, is seen as the subject of art. Its most renowned proponent was Jackson Pollock.
Emotion
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Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939
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Donald Judd, Untitled, 1969
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George Braque, The Portuguese, 1911
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Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930
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Vincent Van Gogh, Night Café, 1888.. Oil on Canvas.
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Dadaism
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An early-20th-century art movement prompted by a revulsion against the horror of World War I. Dada embraced political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. A disdain for convention, often enlivened by humor or whimsy, is characteristic of the art the Dadaists produced.
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Gustav Caillebotte, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877. Oil on Canvas.
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Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, 1884-86. Oil on Canvas.
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Abstraction
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Non-representational; forms and colors arranged without reference to the depiction of an object.
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Barbizon School
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Millet was one of a group of French painters of country life who, to be close to their rural subjects, settled near the village of Barbizon in the forest of Fontainebleau.
This Barbizon School specialized in detailed pictures of forest and countryside. Millet, their most prominent member, was of peasant stock and identified with the hard lot of the country poor.
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Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
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Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958
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Eva Hesse, Hang-Up, 1965-66
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Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52
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Frank Stella, Mas o Menos, 1964
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fin-de-siècle
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French, “end of the century.” A period in Western cultural history from the end of the 19thcentury until just before World War I, when decadence and indulgence masked anxiety about an uncertain future.
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**Cubism**
An early-20th-century art movement that rejected naturalistic depictions, preferring compositions of shapes and forms abstracted from the conventionally perceived world. See also *Analytic Cubism* and *Synthetic Cubism*.
**Analytic Cubism** The first phase of Cubism, developed jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in which the artists analyzed form from every possible vantage point to combine the various views into one pictorial whole.
**Synthetic Cubism** A later phase of Cubism, in which paintings and drawings were constructed from objects and shapes cut from paper or other materials to represent parts of a subject, in order to engage the viewer with pictorial issues, such as figuration, realism, and abstraction.
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Jean Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916-17
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**Post-impressionism**
The term used to describe the stylistically heterogeneous work of the group of late-19th-century painters in France, including van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Cézanne, who more systematically examined the properties and expressive qualities of line, ther from the viewer they are intended to seem. Atmospheric, or aerial, perspective creates the illusion of distance by the greater diminution of color intensity, the shift in color toward an almost neutral blue, and the blurring of contours as the intended distance between eye and object increases.
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**Surrealism**
A successor to Dada, Surrealism incorporated the improvisational nature of its predecessor into its exploration of the ways to express in art the world of dreams and the unconscious. Biomorphic Surrealists, such as Joan Miró, produced largely abstract compositions. Naturalistic Surrealists, notably Salvador Dalí, presented recognizable scenes transformed into a dream or nightmare image.
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**color field painting**
A variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction in which artists sought to reduce painting to its physical essence by pouring diluted paint onto unprimed canvas and letting these pigments soak into the fabric, as exemplifi ed by the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.
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Henri Matisse, Harmony in Red, 1908
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**Lithography**
In 1798, the German printmaker Alois Senefelder (1771–1834) created the first prints using stone instead of metal plates or wooden blocks. In contrast to earlier printing techniques (see “Woodcuts, Engravings, and Etchings,” Chapter 20), in which the artist applied ink either to a raised or incised surface, in lithography (Greek, “stone writing”) the printing and nonprinting areas of the plate are on the same plane.
The chemical phenomenon fundamental to lithography is the repellence of oil and water. The lithographer uses a greasy, oil-based crayon to draw directly on a stone plate and then wipes water onto the stone, which clings only to the areas the drawing does not cover. Next, the artist rolls oil-based ink onto the stone, which adheres to the drawing but is repelled by the water. When the artist presses the stone against paper, only the inked areas—the drawing—transfer to the paper. Colorlithography requires multiple plates, one for each color, and the printmaker must take special care to make sure each impression lines up perfectly with the previous one so that each color prints in its proper place.
One of the earliest masters of this new printmaking process was Honoré Daumier, whose politically biting lithographs (FIG. 27-29) published in a widely read French journal reached an audience of unprecedented size.
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Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-29
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Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960
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Aaron Douglas, Noah’s Ark, c. 1927
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Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857 (2x3 ft)
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**Romanticism**
A Western cultural phenomenon, beginning around 1750 and ending about 1850, that gave precedence to feeling and imagination over reason and thought. More narrowly, the art movement that flourished from about 1800 to 1840.
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Oil on Canvas.
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Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas; 8’ 6” x 10’ 8”.
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Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950
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**hard edge painting**
A variant of Post-Painterly Abstraction that rigidly excluded all reference to gesture and incorporated smoothknifeedge geometric forms to express the notion that painting should be reduced to its visual components.
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**Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels**
The rise of the urban working class was fundamental to the ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883), one of the era’s dominant figures. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin. After moving to Paris, he met fellow German Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), who became his lifelong collaborator. Together they wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848), which called for the working class to overthrow the capitalist system. As did other 19th-century empiricists, Marx believed scientific, rational law governed nature and, indeed, all human history. For Marx, economic forces based on class struggle induced historical change. Throughout history, insisted Marx, those who controlled the means of production conflicted with those whose labor they exploited for their own enrichment—a dynamic he called “dialectical materialism.”Marx advocated the creation of a socialist state in which the working class seized power and destroyed capitalism. This new political, social, and economic system—Marxism— held great appeal for the oppressed as well as for many intellectuals.
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Edvard Munch, The Scream 1893. Tempera and pastels on cardboard
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Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931
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Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley, 1935
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**Federal Art Project (Works Progress Administration)**
In the 1930s, much of the Western world was plunged into the Great Depression, which had a particularly acute effect in the United States. The decade following the catastrophic stock market crash of October 1929 dramatically changed the nation, and artists were among the millions of economic victims. The limited art market virtually disappeared, and museums curtailed both their purchases and exhibition schedules. Many artists sought financial support from the federal government, which established numerous programs to provide relief, assist recovery, and promote reform. Among the programs supporting artists were the Treasury Relief Art Project, founded in 1934 to commission art for federal buildings, and the Works ProgressAdministration (WPA), founded in 1935 to relieve widespread unemployment. Under the WPA, varied activities of the Federal Art Project paid artists, writers, and theater people a regular wage in exchange for work in their professions.
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**Impressionism**
A late-19th-century art movement that sought to capture a fleeting moment, thereby conveying the elusiveness and impermanence of images and conditions.
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**Hierarchy of Genres**
A classification of subject categories adopted during the seventeenth-century by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, whereby history painting (representing themes from ancient biblical history) was considered the highest form of artistic expression.
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Daguerre, Still Life in studio, Daguerreotype, 1837
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José Clemente Orozco, Epic of American Civilization: Hispano-America, Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1932-34
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**Mexican Muralism**
During the period between the two world wars, several Mexican painters achieved international renown for their work both in Mexico and the United States. The eldest of the three was JOSE CLEMENTE OROZCO (1883–1949), one of a group of Mexican artists determined to base their art on the indigenous history and culture existing in Mexico before Europeans arrived. The movement these artists formed was part of the idealistic rethinking of society that occurred in conjunction with the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the lingering political turmoil of the 1920s. Among the projects these politically motivated artists undertook were vast mural cycles placed in public buildings to dramatize and validate the history of Mexico’s native peoples. Orozco worked on one of the first major cycles, painted in 1922 on the walls of the National Training School in Mexico City. He carried the ideas of this mural revolution to the United States, completing many commissions for wall paintings between 1927 and 1934. From 1932 to 1934, he painted a major mural cycle in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The college let Orozco choose the subject, and he designed 14 large panels and 10 smaller ones that together formed a panoramic and symbolic history of ancient and modern Mexico. The murals recount Mexican history from the early mythic days of the feathered-serpent god Quetzalcoatl (see Chapters 18 and 35) to a contemporary and bitterly satiric vision of modern education.
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Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784. Oil on canvas; 10’ 10” x 13’ 11”.
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Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849
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Jacob Lawrence, No 49 from The Migration of the Negro, 1940-41
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Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
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**Pop art**
The interest in abstraction that emerged so forcefully in avant-garde artistic circles during the first half of the 20th century gained even greater momentum in the decades after the end of World War II. However, a reaction to pure formalism in painting and sculpture also set in. The artists of the Pop Art movement reintroduced all of the devices the postwar abstractionists had purged from their artworks. Pop artists revived the tools traditionally used to convey meaning in art, such as signs, symbols, metaphors, allusions, illusions, and figural imagery. They not only embraced representation but also firmly grounded their art in the consumer culture and mass media of the postwar period, thereby making it much more accessible and understandable to the average person. Indeed, the name “Pop Art”—credited to the British art critic Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990)—is short for “popular art” and referred to the popular mass culture and familiar imagery of the contemporary urban environment.
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Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Oil on canvas, 2’ 11 ¼” x 4’
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Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon at the Plague House at Jaffa, 1804. Oil on canvas, 17’ 5” x 23’ 7”.
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Vassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28, 1912
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Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818 – 1819. Oil on canvas, 16’ 1” x 23’ 6”.
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**pointillism**
A system of painting devised by the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat. The artist separates color into its component parts and then applies the component colors to the canvas in tiny dots (points). The image becomes comprehensible only from a distance, when the viewer’s eyes optically blend the pigment dots. Sometimes referred to as divisionism.
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Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863
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**William Henry Fox Talbot**
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Édouard Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882. Oil on Canvas.
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Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863
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Edgar Degas, The Tub, 1886. Pastel.
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Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970
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Diego Rivera, Ancient Mexico, from History of Mexico, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City, 1929
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Edward Muybridge, Horse galloping, Calotype print, 1878
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Francisco Goya, Third of May, 1808, 1814 – 1815. Oil on canvas, 8’ 9” x 13’ 4”.
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**Neoclassicism**
A style of art and architecture that emerged in the late 18th century as part of a general revival of interest in classical cultures, Neoclassical artists adopted themes and styles from ancient Greece and Rome.
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**earthwork**
**Environmental Art** An American art form that emerged in the 1960s. Oft en using the land itself as their material, Environmental artists construct monuments of great scale and minimal form. Permanent or impermanent, these works transform some section of the environment, calling attention bothto the land itself and to the hand of the artist. Sometimes referred to as earthworks.
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**en plein air**
An approach to painting very popular among the Impressionists, in which an artist sketches outdoors to achieve a quick impression of light, air, and color. The artist then takes the sketches to the studio for reworking into more finished works of art.
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**Positivism**
Positivism states that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific. Positivism underlies the enlightenment painters.
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**Armory Show**
From February 17 to March 15, 1913, the American public flocked in large numbers to view the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. The “Armory Show,” as it came universally to be called, was an ambitious endeavor organized primarily by two artists, Walt Kuhn (1877–1949) and Arthur B. Davies (1862–1928). The showincluded more than 1,600 artworks by American and European artists. Among the European artists represented were Matisse, Derain, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp (FIG. 29-35), Kandinsky, Kirchner, Lehmbruck, and Brancusi. In addition to exposing Americans to the latest European artistic developments, the Armory Show also provided American artists with a prime showcase for their work.
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**Étienne Jules Marey**
A French kinesiologist (a person who studies the physiology of body movement) who devised a special camera to investigate the human form and humans in motion.
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**Japonisme**
The French fascination withall things Japanese. Japonisme emerged in the second half of the 19thcentury.
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Claude Monet, Saint-Lazare Train Station 1877. Oil on Canvas.
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**Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre**
The earliest photographic processes were the daguerreotype (FIGS. 27-48 and 27-49), named after L.J.M. Daguerre, and thecalotype (FIG. 27-54). Daguerre was an architect and theatrical set painter and designer. This background led Daguerre and a partner to open a popular entertainment called the Diorama. Audiences witnessed performances of “living paintings” created by changing the lighting effects on a “sandwich” composed of a painted backdrop and several layers of painted translucent front curtains. Daguerre used a camera obscura for the Diorama, but he wanted to find a more efficient and effective procedure. Through a mutual acquaintance, he met Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (17651833), who in 1826 had successfully made a permanent picture of the cityscape outside his upper-story window by exposing, in a camera obscura, a metal plate covered with a light-sensitive coating. Niépce’s process, however, had the significant drawback that it required an eight-hour exposure time. After Niépce died in 1833, Daguerre continued his work, making two important discoveries. Latent development—that is, bringing out the image through treatment in chemical solutions—considerably shortened the length of time needed for exposure. Daguerre also discovered a better way to “fix” the image by chemically stopping the action of light on the photographic plate, which otherwise would continue to darken until the image turned solid black.
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Paul Cezanne, Mont Saint-Victoire, 1902-1904
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**daguerrotype**
**calotype**
**wet-plate technology **
Early photographic techniques.
**daguerreotype** A photograph made by an early method on a plate of chemically treated metal; developed by Louis J. M. Daguerre.
**calotype** From the Greek kalos, “beautiful.” A photographic process in which a positive image is made by shining light through a negative image onto a sheet of sensitized paper.
**wet-plate** An early photographic process in which the photographic plate is exposed, developed, and fixed while wet.
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**Salon **
(in the art-historical sense)
The annual exhibitions, called “Salons” in France, were highly competitive, as was membership in these academies. Subsidized by the government, the French Royal Academy supported a limited range of artistic expression, focusing on traditional subjects and highly polished technique. Because of the challenges modernist art presented to established artistic conventions, the juries for the Salons and other exhibitions often rejected the works more adventurous artists wished to display, thereby preventing the public from viewing any art other than the officially sanctioned forms of expression.
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Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1849
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Honoré Daumier, Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of Art, Lithograph, 1862
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Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
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Thomas Hart Benton, Pioneer Days and Early Settlers, 1936
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Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (second version), 1917
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Honoré Daumier, The Third-Class Carriage, 1862
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Andy Warhol, Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962
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Jacques-Louis David, Coronation of Napoleon, 1805-1808. Oil on canvas, 20’ 4 ½” x 32’ 1 ¾”.
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**Fauvism**
An early-20th-century art movement led by Henri Matisse. For the Fauves, color became the formal element most responsible for pictorial coherence and the primary conveyor of meaning.
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Timothy O’ Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1863
Albumen print (and wet-plate collodion)
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Stuart Davis, Lucky Strike, 1921
