Exam 1

Question 1

Answer 1

Agnes Martin, Night Sea (1963)

Artist Response to Abstract Expressionism, chose to continue painting, but with reduced gestures and repeated movements

Question 2

Answer 2

Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955)

Documentary about the holocaust

Released around the 1945 break between Modernism and Contemporary Art

Question 3

Answer 3

Andre Masson, Battle of Fishes (1926)

Surrealist, painting is an example of Automatism

Question 4

Answer 4

Thomas Hart Benton, Spring on the Missouri (1945)

Prewar American Artist, example of Regionalism

Question 5

Answer 5

Isabel Bishop, Dante and Virgil in Union Square (1932)

Prewar American Artist, example of American Scene Painting

Question 6

Answer 6

Jean Dubuffet, The Exemplary Life of the Soil (1958)

Artist during the time of Postwar Paris Break

Question 7

Answer 7

Jean Dubuffet, Woman Grinding Coffee (1945)

Artist during Postwar Paris Break

Question 8

Answer 8

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

Created during the Modernist Avant-Garde Era

Question 9

Answer 9

Marcel Duchamp, Tu m (1918)

Artist during Modernist Avant-Garde Era

Question 10

Answer 10

Jean Fautrier, Head of Hostage n 22 (1944)

Artist during Post War Paris Break

Question 11

Answer 11

Alberto Giacometti, City Square (1948)

Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break

Question 12

Answer 12

Alberto Giacometti, Head of a Man on a Rod (1947)

Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break

Question 13

Answer 13

Alberto Giacometti, Man Pointing (1947)

Surrealist Artist during Post War Paris Break

Question 14

Answer 14

Alberto Giacometti, The Artists Mother (1950)

Surrealist Artist, Created during Post War Paris Break

Question 15

Answer 15

Adolph Gottlieb, Pictograph (1946)

Surrealist artist, argued painting was an expression of danger

Question 16

Answer 16

Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930)

Pre War American artist, example of Regionalism

Question 17

Answer 17

Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939)

Pre War American Artist, example of Early American Abstraction (Melancholy)

Question 18

Answer 18

Edward Hopper. Room in Brooklyn (1932)

Pre War American Artist, example of Early American Abstraction (Melancholy)

Question 19

Answer 19

Jasper Johns, Flag (1954-5)

Example of response to Critics

Used encaustic technique with hot wax, painted over wax, left imprints of brush strokes

1) Constructing an encounter between painting and ready-made art.
2) “I’m making a flag, not painting or representing one.”
3) Johns says, “I am an allusionist. I make things that will allude to other things.”

Question 20

Answer 20

Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) (1960)

example of a response to critics

Question 21

Answer 21

Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts (1955)

example of response to critics

Piece revolved around Johns homosexuality

Question 22

Answer 22

Klein, Untitled Anthropometry (1960)

Question 23

Answer 23

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, Panel n 1 (1940-1)

Pre War American Art, example of Social Realism

Question 24

Answer 24

Morris Louis, Unfurled Series (1960)

Abstract expressionist painter

created artwork in accordance with Greenburg’s criticism

Question 25

Answer 25

Rene Magritte, *The Treachery of Images* (1928-9) Modernist Avant-Garde, Surrealist Artist

Question 26

Answer 26

Max Ernst, *Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale* (1924) Modernist Avant-Garde, Surrealist artist Example of synthetic cubism

Question 27

Answer 27

Robert Motherwell, *Elegy to the Spanish Republic 34* (1953-4) Abstract expressionist painter Criticized by Greenburg for referencing the real world

Question 28

Answer 28

Barnett Newman, *Onement I* (1948) Abstract Expressionist artist Zip is autographic gesture, draws the eye

Question 29

Answer 29

Barnett Newman, *The Slaying of Osiris* (1945) Abstract expressionist painter

Question 30

Answer 30

Barnett Newman, *Vir Heroicus Sublimus* (1950-1) Abstract Expressionist Painter 5 zips present in composition

Question 31

Answer 31

Jackson Pollock, *Guardians of the Secret* (1943) Abstract Expressionist Painter

Question 32

Answer 32

Jackson Pollock, *Lavender Mist* (1950) Abstract Expressionist Painter

Question 33

Answer 33

Jackson Pollock, *Male and Female* (1942) Abstract Expressionist Painter

Question 34

Answer 34

Jackson Pollock, *Number 1, 1948* (1948) Abstract Expressionist Painter

Question 35

Answer 35

Jackson Pollock, *Shimmering Substance* (1946) Abstract Expressionist Painter

Question 36

Answer 36

Robert Rauschenberg, *Bed* (1955) Example of response to critics

Question 37

Answer 37

Robert Rauschenberg, *Collection* (1954) Example of artist response to critics

Question 38

Answer 38

Robert Rauschenberg, *Erased de Kooning Drawing* (1953) Example of artist response to critics

Question 39

Answer 39

Robert Rauschenberg, *Rebus* (1955) Example of artist response to Critics

Question 40

Answer 40

Reginald Marsh, *Twenty Cent Movie* (1936) Pre War American Artist, example of American Scene Painting

Question 41

Answer 41

Mark Rothko, *Four Darks in Red* (1958) Abstract Expressionist Painter

Question 42

Answer 42

Mark Rothko, *Orange and Yellow* (1957) Abstract expressionist painter Felt that the squares were abstract performers that stood in for the human body

Question 43

Answer 43

Mark Rothko, *Primeval Landscape* (1944) Abstract Expressionist Painter

Question 44

Answer 44

Frank Stella, *At work on Black Paintings* (1958-9) Response to critic of abstract expressionism, continue painting but with reduced gestures and repeated movements

Question 45

Answer 45

Yves Klein, *Leap into the Void* (1960)

Question 46

Points on Existentialism

Answer 46

Existentialism comes from Jean-Paul Sartre. It deals with the ability to choose in a situation. - Authenticity, freedom, being-for-others, and choice (freedom and responsibility have a complex relationship) - Existence precedes essence (who you are is only formed by your choices) - Ethics: the accountability in postwar Europe, not nihilism

Question 47

Freud's Ideas in *The Interpretation of Dreams* (1900)

Answer 47

1. The unconscious is one's true self or "real" life (Id, Ego, Super Ego) 2. Freud's system is based on the return of the repressed, that is, what one represses returns in some manner until it is dealt with. 3. The primitive is the other side of civilization.

Question 48

4 Types of Early American Painting

Answer 48

1. American Scene Painting: Everyday urban life in the United States 2. Early American Abstraction 3. Regionalism: Idealized scenes in country America, anti-immigrant, anti-semetic, anti-urban 4. Social Realism: Art that consciously makes a political statement

Question 49

Carl Jung and Psychoanalysis

Answer 49

- Disagreed with Freud on the importance of sexuality, believed instincts are desexualized. - Theory of shadow: "True" self that shadows the rational ego - Archetypes: universal images that appear in the mind of the individual - Collective Unconscious: all consciousness is linked individually through time and space

Question 50

Harold Rosenberg

Answer 50

Wrote *The American Action Painters* (1952) - Abstract expressionism represents a clean break with European style - Action is the key aspect. Act of painting is the art, not the final product - Emphasis on explosive, grand, or brutal actions - Canvas acts as a stage for the artist - Each artist in the abstract expressionist movement has their own individual existential struggle - Role of the critic is to make distinctions between real and fake struggles

Question 51

Clement Greenberg

Answer 51

Wrote *Modernist Painting, American Type Painting* - The history of the medium is a continuous evolution; there is no break with the past; "The Fate of Painting." - What is extraneous or irrelevant gets dropped off, what remains is a reduction to its essential essence. - Every medium has an "area of competence" (photography and film deal with reality, painting should not)

Question 52

3 Aspects of The Fate of Painting

Answer 52

1. essence of painting is flat surface (all effort of past art to make illusory pictoral space was false). 2. Shape and frame of support (rectangular canvas must be emphasized) 3. Purity of pigment (color is pure pigment)

Question 53

3 Responses to Critiques of Abstract Expressionism

Answer 53

1. Continue Painting, but with reduced gestures, and more repeated gestures (many grid compositions) 2. Happenings and Performance Art 3. The Duchamp Access (Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenbergs attempts to defy Rosenberg and Greenberg)

Question 54

Art Brut

Answer 54

A term associated with the postwar French art of Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, and Wols. “Crude” or “raw,” outsider art, a new primitivism.

Question 55

Avant-Garde

Answer 55

Originally a French military term meaning “forward or advance guard.” Within art and literature, the term refers to groups of Modernist writers and artists whose work is formally (stylistically) innovative (defies convention). This formal experimentation is usually combined with socio-political goals/ideas, that is, an attempt to unite “art” and “life,” to gesture toward the construction of a more just world, or even to negate the notion of artistic autonomy.

Question 56

Synthetic Cubism

Answer 56

A technique developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque after 1912 in which they construct images through the use of collage and found objects, which are applied to the canvas. The boundary between painting and sculpture is blurred. It is a constructive technique that yields symbolic, chance images. Important because it is an early instance of pre-made, everyday materials entering pictorial space; they are presented rather than represented.

Question 57

Manifesto

Answer 57

A primary form of avant-garde discourse. The original model, which has immense influence on later artistic statements, is the Communist Manifesto (1848) by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. The form allows for a powerful, persuasive argument. Artistic manifestoes make didactic, aggressive, and often irrational statements. A manifesto usually addresses (and often rejects) artistic precedents, lays out an agenda of what the group wishes to accomplish and how, and provides their views on art and society. It is a form of public address: the group announces its arrival to the public. Note also Andre Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).

Question 58

Surrealism

Answer 58

A twentieth-century European avant-garde group based in Paris. The group was introduced by the First Manifesto of Surrealism, which was written by the group’s leader André Breton in October 1924. The group sought to attain an “absolute reality” in which contradictions or opposites cease to be so, that is, a synthesis of opposites (dream and reality, fantastic and the mundane, unconscious and conscious) into a surreality.

Question 59

Automatism

Answer 59

A concept from Surrealism. The pictorial equivalent of automatic writing which aims to liberate the composition (poem, drawing, etc.) from conscious (rational) control; embraces chance, accidents, not being in control. Automatic writing is defined by Breton as “direct dictation from the unconscious mind”; thus, it is a concept derived from Freudian free association techniques that is used to create analogical imagery supposedly presented without editing or correction.

Question 60

Indexical Sign

Answer 60

In semiotics (the science of signs), a type of sign in which the relation between the signifier and the referent is based on factual or existential contiguity. It is a type of sign based on cause and effect, e.g., smoke is an index of fire or a footprint. Marks or traces of a particular (not arbitrary) cause and that cause is the thing to which they refer.

Question 61

Exquisite Corpse

Answer 61

Surrealist communal game of visual chance in which different parts of a body are drawn by different participants. Group activity. Challenges the traditional notion of an author/artist as a single, expressive individual.

Question 62

Informe

Answer 62

Formless.

Question 63

Primitivism

Answer 63

A primary cultural myth of the West (Europe and America) that constructs a non-white, “prehistorial” Other through a set of contradictory terms: childish, frightening, savage, “natural,” etc. Think of the concept of the “noble savage.”

Question 64

Abstract Expressionism

Answer 64

(aka The New York School, The Irascibles). A group of artists in New York City (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, et. al.) that represents the triumph of abstraction in the pstwar period; abstraction as the quintessential “American” art.

Question 65

Post-painterly Abstraction

Answer 65

Coined by Greenberg to refer to the work of Frankenthaler, Louis, and others. The paint seems to compose itself; artist’s gesture is displaced by medium-based processes and systems. Little intervention by the artist. Color absorbed directly into the weave of the raw canvas.

Question 66

Black Mountain College

Answer 66

A small, progressive art school in Asheville, NC that opened in 1933 The school’s headmaster was Josef Albers, who taught at the Bauhaus in Germany before that art school was dissolved by the Nazis.