Paintings Flashcards
Charles-Eduard Jeanneret, Purist Still Life, 1922
Miro, Rope and People I, Barcelona, 1935
Duchamp, Bicycle wheel, 1913
Allow him to leap past old aesthetic questions of crat, medium, taste to new questions that were potentially ontological (what is art), epistempological (how do we know it) and institutional (who determines it)
- Term not yet in place, first “readymade”
- He only calls it this once he moves to NYC in 1915 for war,
- Is it a work (required no labour on part of the artist), wheel doesnt function, etc…
Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
- Status secured by further catalogue of MoMA in 1939, Picasso Forty Years of His Art which coincided with MoMa’s acquisition of the painting that year.
- It was also designed to be a major intervention on contemporary practice
- Not exhibited until 1916
- In scale and theme, evoke tradition of Salon, but also sexually ambiguous nudes of modernist painters such as Cezanne and Matisse
- Followed normal Academic preparatory procedures for a Salon ‘set piece’ with numerous sketches and studies on paper, canvas and wood, often in colour. Procedure at odds with most modernist/avant-garde practices which valourized “spontaneity” or “directness”
Avignon: special meaning to the artist, lived steps from Calle d’Avignon in Barcelona, grandfather came from Avignon. There wer supposed to be men in it originally.
- Quote Ingres’ Venus Anadyonmène which is token of commercial exchange between men and women (actually or representationally): it presupposes two encounters: an imaginary one, which is pictured and an actual one between viewer and image. Legitimation of the representation of naked women, in scenes of brothels which imply the voyeuristic gaze of the male viewer and thereby naturalize the viewers position.
- Polarities between mask/syphilitic faces and nudes – idea of sex as potential death as great social issue. Undermines existing expectations of stable meanings
Recall: for Saussure the relationship between signifier and signified is not natural but arbitrary (no reason the sound of “cat” is assigned to the animal)
Venus pose and odalisque pose gendered signifiers of unblemished availability. Language system of the body. Artist’s use of this pose in an image, compared to linguistic utterance, a statement, parole (speech). Act of individual selecting signs from the language system and combing them for specific purposes. Meaning depends not only on the code of the language, but also the context in which they are used.
Because Picasso’s utterance is formally and technically different(heavy paint texture on particular heads and hands, visible brush lines on central poses), functions to disrupt relation between sign and system to reveal the sign’s ideological meaning. Viewer deprived the safety of expectation (the effect of de-familiarization)
Picasso, Verre et bouteille de Suze, 1912.
- Can’t rely on likeness to « glass » or « bottle », objects mentioned in title. Infer “bottle” by identifying an actual label, as part of the object.
- Newspaper strategically laid in different directions – can be read as providing texture, perhaps shallow space etc… can also be read literally = cut pieces from first two pages with references to Balkan War. Can read about the wounded, battle movements, threat of famine. Upside down part is about Choldera. Left hand side, next to glass, juxtapose with a story of pacifist demonstration of people changing down with war.
- Specifically chooses Suze at the center of the collage, named after center of Slavic languages on eastern shore of Adriatic, which made up the Balkan league (Bulgaria/Serbia/Greece/Montenegro) which fought the first Balkan war against Turkey 1912-13.
- Allude to contemporary political/moral issues in form that suggests custom café talk, references and connections understood by a certain group.
Social/cultural relations pushing individualistic aesthetic practice away from engagement with collective political action, intellectuals and artists from workers, French from foreigners.
- Pasted newspaper therefore registers NOT affiliation but rather DISLOCATION between Picasso and the left, the stories of Balkan war serve as formal and figurative background of events to a private life symbolized by object in foreground and esoteric manner of their depiction
- Rupture of public and private is veiled here in the richness of colour and materials. Still not entire rupture from orthodoxy, : radical formal inventiveness and esoteric intertextuality anchored to traditional pictorial genres and aesthetic values
- Picasso “mocking” cultural hierarchies? Register tensions and pressures of the moment, which separated popular, dominant culture as “low” from “high”
- Consistent selection of cheapest, least culturally elevated example of whatever medium was employed (cheaper daily, the one most widely read), drew on advertisements that were cheapest and crudest: not the new technology of photographic illustration. Wall paper is that found in working class homes. Undermine the values of “great” (classical) tradition of the Louvre, distinguish aesthetic form dominant discourse of traditionalism
Fautrier, La Juive, 1943
-Should be considered as unique within the Otages series: taken together, the presence of two paintings of a Jewess executed during the Occupation deserves considerable explication and certainly more than has been allotted to them.
If Fautrier had indeed wanted to provoke by using such loaded, attention-grabbing titles, why was neither work exhibited in the inaugural Otages show?
Anti-semitism was at its height immediately after the war
Oradrour-sur-Glane was the site of a brutal massacre carried out by retreating Nazi army. This became the sign of French victimization at the hands of the invading Nazi forces: an unequivocal symbol of French innocence before unspeakable Nazi aggression.
- Underlying message behind the painting was that, like those slaughtered, all French were and had been victims – or hostages under the occupation
- La Juive would have carried an altogether different message. Rather than eliciting identification, she would have signified Otherness. Whereas with Oradour, the full horror of the Occupation was placed squarely (and safely) in the hands of the Nazi aggressor, the inclusion of two Jewesses in the 1945 exhibition would have invariably suggested the complicity and duplicity of the French audience
Giacometti, Suspended Ball, 1930
“If Giacometti had begun in 1926 and 27 with a conception of primitive art inscribed on the Luquet side of the ledger, he had moved by 1930 to that of Bataille’s.”
- Presence of primitive models immediately obvious to people viewing his work.
- Krauss likens it to an “erotic machine” that sets of sexual emotion of anyone watching it function (Related to unconscious desires)
- but it is more explicitly sadistic than previous works, the sliding action visibly relates the sculpture’s grooved sphere to its wedge-shaped partner suggests not only the act of caressing, but also the act of cutting. (recall cutting eyeball in Chien andalou)
- Double gesture incarnating love and violence simultaneously, fundamental ambiguity with relation to sexual identity
Alteration – Oscillation of meaning as primal contradiction. This work is structured as a binary opposition, with the two sexes, male and female, juxtaposed and contrasted, the value of each of these terms does not remain fixed. Each element may be read as a symbol of either masculine or feminine sex (and for the ball additional readings as buttocks and eye, neither determined by gender), the identification of either form within any given reading Is only possible in opposition to its mate.
-Alteration constant in its continual movement,
Identify each of the four quadrants with a symbol of the four natural elements.
-Representation of space which is simultaneously ideographic and visual. Each presents notion of spatial recession to the eye of the beholder: three conversing lines of sail in upper left, point towards which the perforated lines direct themselves towards upper right., parallelism of sign for waves, letters for “sable” increase in size moving towards the right: instead of pictorial field which establishes a single vanishing point, fan-like perspective with vanishing points gravitating towards each of the picture’s four corners. Both structures and sets into motion the variegated wash of the ground.
Wols, Le Cirque; Prise de Vue et Projection Simultanée 1940.
Boccioni, Riot in Galleria, 1910
- Depicts a riot in a bourgeois site of pleasure and consumption at the heart of Milan (most famous arcade the Galleria Vitorio Emanuele).
- Specifically modern urban setting: a shopping arcade where the signs of pleasure, fashion, advertising, and consumption create a new, destabilized hallucinatory space. Paradoxically, this very modernity is linked to a resurgence of atavistic behaviour (new artificial intoxicants -alchohol, cosmetics, hats, electric lights- release regressive or submerged tendencies).
- Centered on a rivalry between two prostitutes, locked in battle. Portray physical and psychological effects of an agitated crowd. Hysteria spreads like a form of contagion outwards while it also precipitates a stampede inward toward the center.
- Paintings literal edge is treated as a boundary to be transgressed on all sides; Boccioni crops the electric lamp at the top and causes figures to flow into the pictorial field from the foreground and sides as if compelled by magnetic force.
- Radiant electrical light suffuses the scene and enhances the sense that a current of energy runs through this crowd, connecting each individual to the others. Dazzling specks of complementary colour dissolve the boundaries between figures so bodies flow into each other and the picture ground
- Powered by Italy’s first electric plant, built on adjoining street
- Atmosphere charged with energy, glittering lights dissolve distinct forms of the figures and diminish clarity of spatial relations, suggesting an immersion of all things in shimming field without fixed points or stable boundaries
Giacometti, On ne joue plus, 1930-31
Formal innovation of Giacometti’s sculptures, unprepared for by anything else in the history of the medium, was heir ninety-degree turn of the axis of the monument to fold its vertical dimension onto the horizontality of the earth. Primitivism had been central to Giacometti’s success in freeing himself not only from the classical sculptural tradition but also from the cubist constructions that had appeared in the early 1920s as the only logical alternative. His work matured as a result.
- Conceives of sculpture as a game board, cratered with semicircular hollows modelled on African pebble game, but in its center are sunk two tiny coffins with their lids eschew. Board space fused with that of necropolis.
- All works conceive of as a base.
Bataille: vertical axis emblematizes man’s pretensions toward the elevated, the spiritual and the ideal: his claim that uprightness separates him biologically from the bestial distinguishes him ethically as well. But he does not believe in this distinction, and insists on the presence – behind the repressive assumptions of verticality – of the lowness as the real source of libidinal energy.
- Recall opposition between what is not artistically determined (the ground) and what is (the sculpture). The very access of verticality declares the apartness of sculptures representational field from the world of actuality, and this dimension is traditionally introduced by the uprightness of a pedestal, with its initiation of the lift of the work above the ground, its removal from the space of the real. Like the picture frame, the pedestal closes off the virtual field of representation from the actual space around it.
- But if the picture was only the frame, this distinction would not be so easy, and the representation begins to fuse with its literal surroundings.
- Rotation of the axis onto the horizontal plane was further specified by the contents of the work as the “lowering” of the object, thereby joining it simultaneously to the ground and to the real – to the actuality of space and the literalness of motion in real time.
- Again, at its heart is his relationship with trivial art and the primitive.
- He frequently drew objects seen in magazines which published on oceanic tribal art
It is not to the surrealist conceptual domain, with its games of chance and object trouve that we should look for the matrix of ideas that operate Giacometti’s conception of sculpture’s rotated axis: the horizontal gameboard, movement in real time, sculpture as bae, base as necropolis. The year all this began was 1930 and that period Giacometti was still connected to Documents.
de Chirico, La gare Montparnasse, 1914
- Although more photogenic buildings were obviously available, de Chirico chose to portray a railroad station. Not a frontal view, but a side view, most of which is occupied by an incongruous horizontal porch. Clearly no interest in creating a monumental portrait.
- Except for the occasional statue of a political figure, the urban spaces “revel in the bliss of a history-free cityscape.”
–Evince mystery and disquiet “through utter clarity” – not unlike Nietzsche’s “obscurity of light,” whereby mystery derives from an “aesthetics of forgetting,” based on clarity and desertion rather than memory or nostalgia. “It is only by means of forgetfulness that men can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess the truth.”
-In their very evacuation of epistemological certainty, the metaphysical paintings revel in “the space opened up by their loss.”
Picasso, Olga in an Armchair, 1917
- Look to Renoir, Corot, Ingres, 19th century french influences. Still, sitting next to Cubist still lifes, now impregnated with vistas of deep space, prettifide by a decorative palette of pinks and cerulean blues.
- Complicates the narrative of post-war rapel à l’ordre ; he had begun to embrace classical style before the war
- Often read socio-politically or biographically; this discredits the idea that the postwar manner can logically be deduced from Cubism itself (Collage: grafting of heterogeneous materials - grafting “styles”)
Idea that a fight had already begun, just before the war, oer the legacy of Cubism, over the future that Cubism itself had made possible; either the legacy of pure abstraction as the next logical move after the ascetically reduced grid of analytical cubism.. On the other, Duchamp and Picabia who saw Cubism as opening up to the mechanization of art in an obvious extension of collage into the readymade. Thus, Picabia’s Mechanomorphs.
-Picasso embarks on strange campaign of portraiture of his own, where he churns out image after image, each startlingly like the other in pose, lighting, treatment, scale etc which, seemed to produce more as an act of tracing than a record of seeing. Picasso’s neoclassicism as mechanically drawn, like Picabia’s mechanomorphs.
Fautrier, Sarah, 1943
- Should be considered as unique within the Otages series: taken together, the presence of two paintings of a Jewess executed during the Occupation deserves considerable explication and certainly more than has been allotted to them.
- In fact, series began in Fautrier’s studio in Paris more than a year prior to this arrival in mental institution. This calls for a more sustained reading of the ideological context within which the Otages – and more specifically two of the earliest works in the series, Sarah and La Juive – were generated.
Sarah: name of the wife of the biblical patriarch Abraham, immediately perceived as a Jewish name in the 1940s. Sarah functions as synonym for “La Juive”. This is even seen in contemporary collaborative press.
- Sarah stands for quintessentially assimilated Jew; the threat that she poses lies in her ability to camouflage and disguise her Jewish identity.
- Fautrier himself is part Jewish.
- Coated in greenish, gangrenous tones of putrefaction, right leg foreshadows the complete assimilation of rotting flesh and muddy earth to which the left leg merely outlined, has already succumbed. Disfiguring violence of Sarah is of a sexual nature: gaping eroded vaginal cavity which bespeaks violation and rape.
Miro, Still life with old shoe, 1937
- Usually read as existential respond to condition as exile in Paris and need to anchor himself more firmly in reality. He claims its irrefutably rooted in realism: also an ethical as much as an aesthetic position.
- Nod to van Gogh’s famous shoes, rural imagery to represent his land and people of his country. -Bottle of gin wrapped in torn paper and twine, crust of bread, fork impaling an apple.
- Black is ominous, dissonant rhythms. Just as he tries to affirm the vitality and resilience of the Spanish people (As a regenerative life fre) the specter of death threatens everything with immanent collapse. Teetering on edge of abstraction, challenge their placement in the world.
Meaning is no longer produced as an open structure, metaphor is denied. (shadow of death, skull like contorus of crust of bread, realism offers no hope of escape).
Collapse of social body through the language of an aesthetically besieged realism.
Ozenfant, Cup, glasses, and bottles in front of the window, 1922
- Over two feet tall,
- Vessel as surrogate for the human body? Or resembles classical columns and thus evokes glories of Greece and Rome) offer themselves a firm foundation of the nation’s Mediterranean heritage). Columns bespeak buildings.
- Interior distinguishes inside from an outside, it limits space of enclosure from the vast territory it perforce excludes.
Building, body or boundary, the vase – a motif recurring in many paintings produced in France in the 1920s – repeatedly triggers all three potent allusions.
- Formal integrity, solidity and rectitude notably lacking in pre-war Cubist paintings
- Idea that in all ages man has made vessels, glasses, bottles, plates, made to suit the needs of “maximum capacity, maximum strength, maximum economy of materials, maximum economy of effort.”
- Idea that after shattering war the integrity of vessels will convey hope for reconstruction
- Even base of foremost bottle is not actually play of light but a diagram of cylindricality.
Picasso, Ma Jolie, 1911-12
- Clues or parts combine to give the spectator enough information to construct and idea of a figure and objects.
- Understand the nature of these clues by reference to linguistic figures of speech like metaphor and metonymy
- The surface itself creates an optical tension between depicted pictorial planes and the literal painting surface or ‘flatness’. Here we have the metaphoric possibilities: ‘flatness’ and surface marks as metaphors of paint and the work of painting
Mute tones – late 19th C Pissarro and the like vibrant colour is an equivalent to complexity of vision, sign of difference from bourgeoisie art which was “repressed”.
- Marketability of Fauvism and Impressionism (which had been appropriated by the bourgeoisie)
- Synecdoche of Cubist sign system to encourage viewers to make their own connections, to be active readers. On the other hand, negative relationship to conventional systems of signification, including convention use of colour and its reliance on a particular self-reflexive reader (147)
- Many of Picasso’s works involve puns – verbal, aural, visual – by bringing two similar but distinct signifiers together, the surface relationship between them invested with meaning through inventiveness of author). Can act to destabilize the notion of fixed meaning or an enforced distinction between “real” and “false” connections. -The viewer who engages with this discourse is made aware of the selection, combination, and structuring of elements by which the communication is constructed. This discourse constitutes the reversal of iconic illusionism and requires the viewer to have an active consciousness of the way in which socially specific signifiers convey meaning.
- The viewer who engages with this discourse is made aware of the selection, combination, and structuring of elements by which the communication is constructed. This discourse constitutes the reversal of iconic illusionism and requires the viewer to have an active consciousness of the way in which socially specific signifiers convey meaning.
Dubuffet, Will to power, 1947
Combine rich, thickly worked matter, an outrageous phallicism and deliberately Nietzschean title.
- Bachelard’s link between his elemental and primordial theorisings of the pâte and those of the infant’s first material grasp of the world tally with the contemporary interest in child mentalities that would reappear in Merleau-Ponty’s lectures later in the 1940s
- First material images are dynamic, active and linked to desires that are astonishingly crude
Hautes pâtes – raised pastes, involve – Dubuffet begins working on them in spring 1945 (Fautrier’s Otages were shown just after in October)
Were both aware of Bachelard’s lectures at Collage du France during Occupation?
-pâte as primal matter
MATISSE, Bonheur de vivre, 1906
Boiffard, in Battaile’s “The Big Toe,” Documents, 1929
Capacity of the photograph to focus on either an unfamiliar angle or on a part of the whole, to disconnect the object from surrounding objects and give it undue attention, makes photography particularly susceptible to and able to express the process of fetishization.
- Also substitute part for whole toe stands in for the foot and given compulsive treatment. Draw attention to the idea of the angled look that is intrinsic to the fetishistic process. Focus on toe as almost unsightly.
- Big toe as most human part of the body, because the human toe is most unlike the corresponding part in other animals. Distinguishes animals from humans. Inversion of head and toe and tope to bottom: recall “baseness” that he was interested in.
Dali, Le Jeu lugubre. 1929
- Painted same year Dali joined the surrealists. Use dream narrative, juxtaposed incongruous elements and monstrous forms, use personal motifs (Ex grasshopper) as objects of obsessional phobia.
- Images are clear precise and even similar to metaphysical or neoclassical paintings. Like nature, artist takes pains to conceal his handiwork. But the mimesis, the photographic manner of painting, is placed in doubt of and by itself: Within out setting similitude aside, Dali empties these elements of reality, even of their identity by means of a process that enables him to represent something that may at the same time represent something else.
- Fragmented landscape, central figure has exploded into fragments, the body distends upwards to a head that is torn open to reveal stones, shells, heads, hats. No coherent unity to the figure: it is only the sum of fragmented parts.
- Not only the figure is dismembered: some real elements of collage are stuck onto the canvas, painting as a whole deploys collage-like technique to assembler fragments and parts.
Presence of images that were identifiable individually but more difficult to interpret in relation to each other so as to extract an overall meaning. Narrative picture in which causality that usually governs the unfolding of events has been suppressed.
- In addition to paint, bits of glued paper however their purpose is not to undermine process of representation, but by contrast to increase the sense of trompe l’oeil heightening the deception of the viewer.
- Confusion between areas of paint and collage and the resulting ambiguity come close to the pictures actual essence
- Breton lauds it for evoking “revelatory hallucination,” encourages Dali not to let it be reproduced in Bataille’s essay on painting in Documents. Bataille sees it as diverse and contradictory aspects and figures, identify castration as theme of painting. Focus on dismembered limbs, linked to Oedipus
Dali, Soft Construction with boiled beans (premonition of civil war), 1936
Civil war as dual experience of psychic and social shattering. Interpret crisis in psychoanalytical terms as a cyclical process of destruction and regeneration, invoking Freud’s concept of the death-drive to underscore the traumatic experience of civil war.
“I painted a geological landscape that had been uselessly revolutionized for thousands of years, congealed in its ‘normal course.” Regressive drive toward self-annihilation.
Structured along symbolic axis of fascination and pleasure on one side and revulsion and pain on the other: grimacing face of the central figure, its body torn apart in a brutal act of self-desecration is belied by the seductive force of Dali’s painterly technique, his talent as a miniaturist, mastery of range of textures.
Considering broader implications of Freud’s death drive, as disruptive, conservative force that seeks to restore organic life to a prior, inanimate state in order to release the subject from conflict and tension.
Duchamp, Bottle Rack, 1914
Pushes questions of readymade further, although it might suggest an abstract sculpture, the bottle dryer remains a utilitarian object and simple commodity, compels us to consider complex relationships between aesthetic-value, use-value and exchange-value
Principle questions here of originality and intentionality, art as process of nomination by the authority of the artist?
In bourgeois aestehtics of the enlightenment, art cannot be utilitarian because its value depends on its autonomy, on its “purposiveness without purpose”, preciseless on its uselessness.
GIacometti, City Square, 1948
Boccioni, The City Rises, 1910
- Visualize the utopian dream of the Futurist metropolis
- Construction of an electrical plant on the industrial periphery of Milan, a monumental painting, -Rather than a distant view, immerse spectator in in chaotic sensory fullness of tram right as it reconfigures the urban environment.
- Dynamism of urban life by focusing on collective passions and their corporeal expression as engines of modernity: the élan vitale of a group of proletarian workers on the outskirts of the city. All male, streams of brilliant sunlight
- Must be read in dialogue with Riot in Galleria, 1910
- Exemplify the artist’s fascination with the violent movement of crowds, both involve the exhilarating but frightening dissolution of individual psychic and corporeal boundaries.
Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912
- While the canvas is the literal support of Picasso’s picture, the table is the figurative support of the still life objects that rest upon it. By framing the table, Picasso drew a parallel between these two.
- Opposition of the vertical plane o the tableau to the horizontal plane of the table remains a matter of pictorial allusion.
- Loop and tassel – refer to traditional notion of canvas as transparent vertical frame. Oval shape of the canvas undermines possibility of univocal, literal reading.
- Alternate borders on the interior as inner frames, dismantle traditional binary of oppositions of inside/outside, work of art/exterior world. Intrusion of cane-printed oilcloth operates similarly: subverts the conventional role of the frame to define a coherent border within which the work should be compositionally and materially unified.
- Impossible to determine which compositional paradigm governs the appearance of the oilcloth: should it be taken as literal or real object, is it surface of the table or table cloth resting upon it? (67) Refer to tromp l’oiel tradition while reversing its priorities.
- Deny direct, transparent relation between pictorial signifiers and their referents in the external world. Point to arbitrariness of those signifiers in the absence of a single governing interpretive context or paradigm….Nowhere does the juxtaposition of signifiers represent an attempt to synthesize different views of a table into a single, synthetic whole: rather signifiers remain in opposition.
