art history final (everything)

Rococo

An artistic style from the early to mid-18th century reflecting aristocratic leisure, pleasure, romance, and playfulness. Characteristics include pastel colors, soft brushwork, decorative details, and curving forms.

Fête Galante

A painting showing wealthy aristocrats enjoying outdoor entertainment, music, conversation, and romance.

Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera

Shows elegantly dressed couples traveling to or leaving the island of Cythera, associated with Venus and love. Represents romance, leisure, and aristocratic pleasure. An example of a fête galante.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing

Shows a young woman swinging while a man watches her from below. Uses pastel colors and loose brushwork to represent flirtation, romance, and aristocratic entertainment.

François Boucher, Cupid a Captive

Shows Cupid, the god of love, being playfully restrained by women. Represents love, romance, and playful Rococo themes.

Neoclassicism

An artistic movement from the late 18th century inspired by ancient Greece and Rome that emphasized reason, order, morality, and civic virtue. Characteristics include clean lines, balanced compositions, idealized figures, and serious subject matter.

Age of Enlightenment

An intellectual movement emphasizing reason, knowledge, science, and progress.

Grand Manner

An elevated, idealized style used to represent important subjects and heroic figures in a dignified way.

Exemplum Virtutis

An example of virtue or moral behavior that encourages viewers to act honorably.

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii

Shows three Roman brothers swearing an oath to defend Rome. Represents loyalty, sacrifice, patriotism, and civic duty. Uses strong lines, balance, and a serious subject.

Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Saint Bernard

Shows Napoleon dramatically crossing the Alps on horseback. Presents Napoleon as a powerful, heroic leader through an idealized image.

Thomas Jefferson, Monticello

Jefferson's home in Virginia. Uses classical architectural elements inspired by ancient Roman and Greek buildings. Reflects balance, symmetry, and classical influence.

Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe

Shows General Wolfe dying during the Battle of Quebec. Presents a contemporary historical event in a serious, heroic manner and connects sacrifice with patriotism.

Horatio Greenough, George Washington

A sculpture presenting Washington in an idealized, classical style. Represents Washington like an ancient Roman leader, connecting American leadership with classical ideals.

Romanticism

An artistic movement from the early to mid-19th century that reacted against Neoclassicism's emphasis on reason and instead emphasized emotion, imagination, nature, and individual experience. Characteristics include dramatic scenes, powerful emotions, dynamic compositions, and tragedy.

The Sublime

An experience of awe, wonder, or even fear when confronted with something powerful or overwhelming, especially nature.

Hudson River School

A group of American landscape painters influenced by Romanticism who emphasized the beauty and power of the American landscape.

Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa

Shows survivors of a shipwreck stranded on a raft. Based on a real tragedy involving government negligence. Represents desperation, suffering, survival, and social criticism.

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People

Represents the 1830 French Revolution. Liberty leads revolutionaries while holding the French flag. Represents freedom, revolution, and sacrifice.

François Rude, Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 (La Marseillaise)

A sculptural relief on the Arc de Triomphe showing volunteers being inspired to defend France. Uses dramatic movement and emotional expressions to represent patriotism.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

Shows a lone figure looking over a vast, foggy landscape. Represents individual reflection, isolation, and the sublime.

Thomas Cole, The Oxbow

Shows a dramatic American landscape with contrasting areas of wilderness and cultivated land. Reflects the beauty and power of nature and humanity's relationship with the environment.

Realism

An artistic movement from the mid-to-late 19th century that reacted against Romantic idealism and industrial change by depicting everyday life and ordinary people truthfully. Characteristics include working-class life, labor, social issues, and modern life.

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers

Shows two laborers breaking stones. Focuses on difficult working conditions and working-class life without idealizing the workers.

Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners

Shows three women collecting leftover grain after a harvest. Focuses on rural poverty and ordinary labor.

John Everett Millais, Ophelia

Shows Ophelia floating in a stream surrounded by detailed plants and flowers. Based on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Demonstrates detailed observation of nature and narrative realism.

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic

Shows a surgeon performing an operation in front of students. Represents modern medicine and professional life through realistic details and an unidealized subject.

Impressionism

An artistic movement focused on light, color, visible brushstrokes, and capturing fleeting moments of everyday life. Characteristics include bright colors, loose brushstrokes, changing light, and painting outdoors.

En Plein Air

Painting outdoors rather than inside a studio.

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise

Shows a harbor at sunrise. Uses loose brushstrokes and color to capture the atmosphere of a moment. Helped give Impressionism its name.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Ball at the Moulin de la Galette

Shows people socializing and dancing outdoors in Paris. Captures everyday leisure and middle-class social life using visible brushstrokes and the effects of light.

Mary Cassatt, The Bath

Shows a woman bathing a child. Focuses on motherhood and women's everyday experiences. Uses flattened space, unusual angles, and patterned surfaces influenced by Japanese prints.

Japonisme

The influence of Japanese art and design, especially Japanese woodblock prints, on European artists. Influenced unusual angles, cropping, flattened space, patterns, strong outlines, and color areas.

Post-Impressionism

An artistic movement that moved beyond Impressionism by using more structure, symbolism, and emotional intensity.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte

Shows people relaxing in a park. Uses Pointillism, applying small dots of color that visually blend when viewed from a distance.

Pointillism

A painting technique that uses small dots of color that blend visually when viewed from a distance.

Paul Cézanne, Basket of Apples

Shows a still life with apples, a basket, and other objects. Uses simplified geometric forms and multiple viewpoints, emphasizing structure rather than simply capturing light.

Symbolism

An artistic movement focused on inner ideas, emotions, imagination, and dreamlike or mystical imagery.

Edvard Munch, The Scream

Shows a figure holding its face against a dramatic landscape. Uses distorted forms and intense colors to represent anxiety, fear, and psychological distress.

Modernism

An artistic movement that challenged traditional artistic rules and experimented with color, perspective, composition, and abstraction.

Fauvism

An artistic movement characterized by bold, unnatural colors, loose brushwork, and emotional expression.

Henri Matisse, The Joy of Life

Shows nude figures in a colorful, dreamlike landscape. Uses bright, unnatural colors and simplified forms. Flattens perspective and celebrates pleasure and harmony between humans and nature.

Expressionism

An artistic movement that uses distortion and intense visual expression to communicate emotions and psychological experiences.

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28

Uses abstract shapes, colors, and energetic forms rather than realistic representation. Communicates emotion through color and abstraction.

Cubism

An artistic movement that breaks objects and figures into geometric shapes and shows multiple viewpoints at once.

Pablo Picasso, The Women of Avignon (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon)

Shows five women with angular, fragmented bodies and faces. Rejects traditional perspective and realistic proportions. Influenced by African masks and geometric forms. Helped establish Cubism.

Georges Braque, Violin and Palette

Breaks a recognizable object into geometric shapes and fragmented planes. Demonstrates Cubism's rejection of traditional realistic representation.

Analytic Cubism

The first phase of Cubism, characterized by fragmented forms, jagged edges, sharp lines, and multiple viewpoints.

Synthetic Cubism

The later phase of Cubism, characterized by flatter shapes, larger planes, simplified forms, collage, and found materials.

Futurism

An artistic movement that celebrates speed, technology, machines, movement, and modern life.

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

A sculpture of a figure appearing to move forward. Uses flowing, abstract forms to communicate movement and speed.

Dada

An artistic movement that rejected traditional artistic values and embraced anti-art, absurdity, chance, and unconventional materials. Developed partly as a reaction to World War I.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain

A manufactured urinal presented as an artwork. Challenges the definition of art and the importance of traditional artistic skill. An example of a readymade.

Readymade

An ordinary manufactured object presented as a work of art.

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife

Uses photomontage, combining images from newspapers and magazines. Criticizes politics, society, and traditional gender roles.

Photomontage

An artwork created by combining photographs or images from different sources.

De Stijl

An artistic movement focused on pure abstraction, primary colors, balance, and harmony.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Red, and Blue

Uses horizontal and vertical black lines with primary colors. Reduces art to simple geometric forms and emphasizes balance and harmony.

Surrealism

An artistic movement that explores dreams, the subconscious, and bizarre imagery.

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory

Shows melting clocks in a strange landscape. Creates a dreamlike environment and challenges the viewer's understanding of time and reality.

Meret Oppenheim, Luncheon in Fur

A teacup, saucer, and spoon covered in animal fur. Combines familiar objects with unexpected materials to create an unusual and unsettling experience.

Regionalism

An artistic movement focused on American identity, recognizable subjects, traditional values, and realistic imagery.

Grant Wood, American Gothic

Shows a farmer holding a pitchfork beside a woman. Represents rural American life through realistic, recognizable figures and a serious composition.

Abstract Expressionism

An artistic movement characterized by large-scale artwork that emphasizes emotional gestures or fields of color.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

Uses dripping and splattering paint across a large canvas. Focuses on movement, gesture, and the physical act of painting. Represents action painting.

Action Painting

A style of painting that emphasizes the physical act of applying paint through gestures, movement, dripping, and splattering.

Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow

Uses large areas of color to create emotional responses. Represents Color Field painting.

Color Field

An Abstract Expressionist style using large areas of color to create emotional effects.

Pop Art

An artistic movement focused on consumer culture, advertising, celebrity imagery, and mass media.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych

Repeats images of Marilyn Monroe. Uses celebrity imagery and mass media to connect art with mass production and consumer culture.

Minimalism

An artistic movement characterized by geometric simplicity, industrial materials, and repetition.

Donald Judd, Untitled

Uses simple geometric forms and industrial materials. Avoids unnecessary decoration and personal expression, emphasizing the physical object itself.

Environmental / Site-Specific Art

Art connected to a natural setting or a specific location, often using large-scale forms and viewer experience.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty

A large spiral-shaped earthwork made from rocks and earth in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Connects art with nature, the environment, and the viewer's experience of a location.

Postmodern Art

An artistic movement that challenges traditional ideas about originality and artistic meaning through irony, appropriation, and mixing styles.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21

Sherman photographs herself acting as a fictional character. Imitates the appearance of a movie still and explores identity, stereotypes, and how images shape our understanding of people.

Appropriation

The use of existing images, objects, or styles in a new artwork.

Avant-Garde

Artists or movements that are experimental and challenge traditional ideas.

Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, Eiffel Tower

Built for the 1889 Paris World's Fair. Made of wrought iron and demonstrates new materials, engineering, and modern technology.

Wrought Iron

A type of iron used in construction and decoration, known for its strength and ability to be shaped.

Louis Henry Sullivan, Wainwright Building

Located in St. Louis, Missouri. An early modern office building and example of the Chicago School. Uses a steel skeleton and emphasizes vertical height. Includes a base, body, and cornice.

Chicago School

A group of architects associated with the development of modern skyscrapers, steel-frame construction, and new building technologies.

Form Follows Function

The idea that a building's design should reflect its purpose.

Art Nouveau

A decorative architectural style inspired by nature and organic forms. Characteristics include curving and flowing lines, floral and plant-inspired patterns, elaborate decorative details, and wrought iron.

Victor Horta

An architect associated with Art Nouveau, known for nature-inspired decoration and flowing architectural lines.

Bauhaus Movement

A movement founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919 that combined art, craft, and industrial design. Emphasized function, simplicity, geometric forms, and mass production.

Walter Gropius

Founded the Bauhaus School in Germany in 1919.

International Style

A modern architectural style focused on simplicity, functionality, clean lines, and modern materials such as glass, steel, and ferroconcrete.

Ferroconcrete

Reinforced concrete containing steel.

Cantilever

A projecting structure supported at one end while the other end extends outward.

Machine for Living

Le Corbusier's description of a house designed for efficiency and modern life.

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye

Located in Poissy, France, and built between 1928 and 1931. The house is lifted off the ground by thin supporting posts and features ribbon windows, an open interior, and a roof patio. Its white exterior represents modern cleanliness and simplicity.

Prairie Style

An architectural style emphasizing harmony between buildings and their environment. Characteristics include horizontal lines, natural materials, and cantilevered structures.

Organic Architecture

Architecture designed to harmonize with nature and its surroundings.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater

Built in Pennsylvania between 1935 and 1938. Designed over a waterfall. Uses cantilevered terraces and horizontal lines. Incorporates natural stone and the surrounding landscape to demonstrate harmony between architecture and nature.

Reconstruction and Modernism

An architectural period after World War II focused on rebuilding cities efficiently through functional design, simplicity, and new construction technologies.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram Building

Located in New York City and built between 1956 and 1958. Uses steel and glass, clean lines, and a geometric structure. Represents corporate power and modern design.

Postmodernism

An architectural movement that reacted against Modernism by bringing back decoration, color, historical references, irony, and playful designs.

Less Is a Bore

Robert Venturi's phrase challenging the Modernist idea that less is more.

Robert Venturi, Vanna Venturi House

Uses a recognizable traditional house shape, decorative details, and playful geometric forms. Challenges the simplicity of Modernist architecture.