Art ACDEC 22-28

Paragraph 1: Caravaggio

Caravaggio (1571–1610), an Italian Baroque painter, was renowned for his dramatic use of light and dark, and his technique influenced many artists who followed. [...] It is no wonder that several patrons of Caravaggio’s canvases rejected them for this reason.

Caravaggio’s work is so important that artworks using extremes of dark and light are often termed “caravaggesque.” Caravaggio’s work is also notable for its provocative degree of naturalism. For example, Caravaggio portrayed the Virgin Mary and the apostles not as noble figures in classical garb as they had traditionally been represented, but instead depicted them as poor and simple folks in threadbare garments. His use of actual lower-class individuals as models for his work helped him achieve this effect.

Paragraph 3: Gianlorenzo Bernini

The most important Baroque artist, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), the son of a sculptor, was a child prodigy who received recognition from the Pope at age seventeen. [...] His most important masterpiece, the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52), is set into the altar of the Cornaro Chapel.

Bernini did his most significant work in sculpture, but he was also a talented architect, painter, and draftsman. He worked as a designer in the theater, and many of his works reflect the influence of his theatrical background.

Paragraph 1: Bernini’s Style

The space includes a concealed stained-glass window that bathes the figure of the saint in dramatic gold lighting, as if she were on a stage. [...] Instead, Bernini pushed the use of marble to new limits and tried to make stone look like real fabric and even clouds.

Bernini treated his medium in a new way as well. He did not adhere to the classical calm and natural flow of drapery around the figure that had been used in the past.

Rubens and Rembrandt

The importance of the Baroque style extended beyond Italy. [...] Though Rembrandt died in poverty, the self-portraits of his later years are considered to be some of the greatest studies of the inner life of the sitter ever to be painted.

In Flanders, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) established a huge workshop and produced works of great energy and color that became models for many artists. In the mid-seventeenth century, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), a Dutch artist, created some of the best-known works from the Baroque period. Rembrandt is recognized not only as a painter and printmaker, but also as one of the greatest draftsmen ever. Perhaps his best-known work is The Night Watch (1642), more properly known as Sortie of Captain Banning Cocq’s Company of the Civic Guard. Like many other group portraits of the time, each member of the company depicted paid a certain sum to be included in the painting. Rembrandt chose to break with tradition and grouped the members of the company in a way that gave more attention to some members than to others. This break with tradition, as well as other problems in his life, ultimately caused the decline of his career.

Louis XIV and Versailles

It might be argued that the Baroque period reached its peak in France. [...] The opulence and power of this “sun king,” around whom the world of the court revolved, became a model that contemporaneous monarchs tried to emulate.

There, Louis XIV had come to power, and his long reign was marked by a blossoming of French culture. Louis XIV united all of France and built a lavish palace at Versailles beginning in 1669. The palace and its grounds covered about two thousand acres and included various grand chateaux and gardens. There was a stable, capable of housing hundreds of horses, and a grand orangerie, or greenhouse, for the king’s orange trees. Eventually there was also a zoo and a system of fountains and waterfalls that included a grand canal large enough for the staging of mock sea battles.

The Salon and the Academy

An important feature of Louis XIV’s court that was to influence art well into the nineteenth century was the system of choosing and supporting artists called the Salon. [...] It was also under the rule of Louis XIV that the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, often referred to simply as the “Academy,” was established, and it soon came to be a means for imposing aesthetic standards and principles of taste.

This annual exhibition established a set of rules for judging art that is still influential in the art world today

Velázquez

To the south, the Spanish court of King Philip IV of Spain tried to emulate the court of France, and his court painter, Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), was a contemporary of Bernini. [...] In fact, Velázquez’s work had an influence on the movement we call Impressionism.

Velázquez’s method of building his figures from patches of color, rather than starting from a drawing, became a model for many later artists.

Rococo

While the Rococo style might be seen as an extension of the Baroque period, it is quite different in form and content. [...] The emphasis was on light-hearted decoration with the use of gold and pastel colors.

Whereas the Baroque aimed to arouse grand emotions, Rococo works were celebrations of gaiety, romance, and the frivolity of the grand life at court, particularly the court at Versailles.

Watteau and Boucher

Three artists who excelled at capturing the elegance and wit so valued by their aristocratic patrons are considered the greatest masters of the Rococo style. [...] He became the favorite painter of Madame Pompadour, mistress to Louis XV, and his works often transformed the characters of classical myth into scenes of courtly gallantry, with an emphasis on nubile nudes.

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was the leader of a new generation and the innovator of a new genre of painting called the fête galante. Paintings of this genre generally depicted members of the nobility in elegant contemporary dress enjoying leisure time in the countryside. François Boucher (1703–70) was influenced by Watteau’s delicate style

Fragonard

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was also promoted by Madame Pompadour. [...] Fragonard studied with Boucher, and his works strongly reflect Boucher’s influence.

Neoclassicism

The Revolution of 1789 in France ushered in an era of great change throughout Europe, and the idea of a democratic republic ruled by and for the people was reflected in the artwork of the time. [...] The work of David’s pupil, Jean Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), shows the sharp outlines, unemotional figures, careful geometric composition, and rational order that are hallmarks of the Neoclassical style.

In an attempt to hearken back to the democratic ideals of the ancient world, art of this period demonstrated a revival of interest in the art of classical Greece and Rome. This style, called Neoclassicism, emerged in the decades leading up to the Revolution and was also influenced by Enlightenment philosophy. The Neoclassical style, a direct challenge to the Rococo and its associations with the aristocracy, is epitomized in the work of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825), whose paintings, such as the Oath of the Horatii (1784), illustrated republican virtues. Following the Revolution, David joined members of the new government as the master of ceremonies for the grand revolutionary mass rallies. Later he became a dedicated painter to Napoleon Bonaparte, and in this capacity he painted large propagandistic canvases that would seem to undermine his earlier revolutionary ideals. A closer investigation of his work and his career reveals the complicated world of an artist and his patrons.

Romanticism

Ingres’s rival, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), was a proponent of Romanticism. [...] Delacroix’s works are characteristic of the Romantic movement in that they centered on exotic themes and included foreign settings, violence involving animals, and historical subject matter.

This style hearkened back to the emotional emphasis of the Baroque and had similar characteristics, though the subject matter was different. Whereas Neoclassical works emphasized line, order, and a cool detachment, Romantic painting tended to be highly imaginative and was characterized by an emotional and dreamlike quality—the Romantics favored feeling over reason. Romantic works are also characterized by their incorporation of exotic or melodramatic elements and often took awe-inspiring natural wonders as their subject matter. Théodore Gericault (1791–1824) and William Blake (1757–1827) were also important Romantic artists.

Realism

In many ways, Realism was a reaction to Neoclassicism and Romanticism. [...] Realism can also be seen in the works of Honoré Daumier (1808–79) and Jean François Millet (1814–75).

The Realist style was inspired by the idea that painting must illustrate all the features of its subjects, including the negative ones. It was also obligated to show the lives of ordinary people as subjects that were as important as the historical and religious themes that dominated the art exhibitions of the day. The artist who represented this movement most forcefully was Gustave Courbet (1819–77), a flamboyant and outgoing personality who outraged conventional audiences by showing a painting of ordinary workmen repairing a road at the official government-sponsored Salon. This work, called The Stonebreakers (1849–50), also had political implications in the context of a wave of revolutions that spread across Europe beginning in 1848.

Impressionism Introduction:

Impressionism largely grew out of dissatisfaction with the rigid rules that had come to dominate the Salons held to recognize selected artists each year. [...] The scandal surrounding this work resulted from its violation of the unwritten rule that the only appropriate nudes in contemporary art were classical figures or women in suitably exotic settings.

Édouard Manet (1832–83) is sometimes referred to as the first Impressionist. Although he refused to consider himself as one of the Impressionists, Manet’s work, which showed light by juxtaposing bright, contrasting colors, nonetheless greatly inspired and influenced the generation of artists following him. Manet’s painting Le Dejéuner sur L’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) (1863)—included in the Salon des Refusés in 1863, an exhibit of works rejected by the “official” Salon—was singled out for ridicule.

Manet's Scandal

In Luncheon on the Grass, Manet based his work on an engraving with a classical subject matter, but he showed contemporary clothed men with a nude woman as part of the group. [...] This caused an uproar.

Impressionist Techniques

While Manet continued to submit his work to the Salon, other artists who disagreed with the rigid artistic standards espoused by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and favored by the Salon set about establishing Impressionism as a new style. [...] Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) and Alfred Sisley (1839–99) were two other Impressionists of note.

A work by Claude Monet (1840–1926) was the source of the movement’s name. Monet showed a work that he called Impression, Sunrise (1872), and the critics seized on this mere “impression” as a means by which to ridicule the movement. It was Monet who urged his fellow artists to work outdoors, and these endeavors were aided by technical advances in paint and brush production that made the medium more portable. Impressionist artists put their colors directly on the canvas with rapid strokes to capture the rapidly changing light. Scientific studies of vision and color led to the discovery that shadows were not merely gray but that they reflected the complementary color of the object casting them.

Post-Impressionism / Cézanne

The artists who followed Impressionism, though influenced by the earlier artists, took various features of Impressionism in quite different directions. [...] Here we should note the obvious influence that these ideas, presented first by Cézanne, later had on the development of Cubism in the early twentieth century.

The most influential of these artists was Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Dissatisfied with the lack of solid form in Impressionist works, Cézanne set about redefining art in terms of form. He suggested that a painting could be structured as a series of planes with a clear foreground, middle ground, and background and argued that the objects in the painting could all be reduced to their simplest underlying forms—a cube, a sphere, or a cone.

Seurat

The ongoing search for more and more brilliant color was a unifying feature for many of the Post-Impressionists. [...] The results were vibrant, though the emphasis on technique also resulted in static compositions.

The work of Georges Seurat (1859–91) placed an emphasis on the scientific rules of color. Seurat applied his colors in small dots of complementary colors that blended in the eye of the viewer in what is called optical mixing.

Van Gogh

As Seurat was attracting attention and Cézanne was formulating his rules for painting, a young Dutch painter named Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) was studying art. [...] The intense and jarring yellows, greens, and reds in the poolroom of Van Gogh’s Night Café (1888), which van Gogh considered a place of vice, illustrate this very influential idea.

Van Gogh, using theories of contrasting color and very direct application of paint, set about capturing the bright light of southern France. His vigorous brushwork and twisting forms were designed to capture an intense response, and though his career was short, many of his works have become very well known. Van Gogh developed the idea that the artist’s colors should not slavishly imitate the colors of the natural world, but should be intensified to portray inner human emotions.

Gauguin

The search for intense light and clear color also marks the work of Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), who is perhaps known as much for the story of his life as he is for his art. [...] Searching for more intense color and a more “unschooled” style, he went to Tahiti, where he painted works that depict the island’s lush, tropical setting and native people, as seen through the lens of colonialism.

Though he was a successful stockbroker, Gauguin left his wife and family while in his forties to pursue his art career. He worked for a short time with van Gogh in southern France but was still dissatisfied with his art.

Global and Tech Influences

At this juncture, it is important to note the outside influences that were affecting the changing art world. [...] Artists were intrigued by masks from Africa, and many collected the Japanese prints that were used as packing for shipments of goods from Japan.

The invention of the camera called into question the very need to capture ordinary reality in art. Some of the most important inventions may seem quite mundane. The invention of chemically based paints and the paint tube allowed the Impressionists to paint outdoors easily for the first time. This was also a time of global exploration and colonialism, and the objects brought back from around the world had a profound effect on the Impressionists and the artists who followed.

Degas

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) was an Impressionist whose work exemplified these new influences. [...] Degas often combined the snapshot style of photography with a Japanese-like perspective from slightly above his subject.

Pre-Raphaelites / Art Nouveau

In England, a group of artists dissatisfied with the effects of the Industrial Revolution banded together and became known as the Pre-Raphaelites. [...] Art Nouveau, which became popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a style of decoration, architecture, and design that was characterized by the depiction of leaves and flowers in flowing, sinuous lines.

These artists created a style that attempted to return to the simpler forms of pre-Renaissance art. The Pre-Raphaelites created many quasi-religious works that often blended Romantic, archaic, and moralistic elements. Their emphasis on nature and sweeping curves paved the way for Art Nouveau.

Fauves (Matisse)

As we move into the twentieth century, we see artists who were continually striving to discover new ways of presenting their ideas. [...] Their wild use of arbitrary color earned them the name of fauves, or “wild beasts.”

Furthering the attempts the Post-Impressionists had made to extend the boundaries of color, a group of artists led by Henri Matisse (1869–1954) used colors so intense that they violated the sensibilities of critics and the public alike. Taking their cue from van Gogh, these artists no longer thought their use of color needed to replicate color as seen in the real world.

Cubism

Natural form was to be attacked with equal fervor, as can be seen in developments in Paris around 1908. [...] Cubist works reacted against the naturalistic, often sentimental, artworks that were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Cubists favored abstract forms over lifelike figures.

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), in close collaboration with Georges Braque (1882–1963), was at work developing a whole new system of art. Picasso and Braque broke down and analyzed form in new ways in the style that came to be known as Cubism. Psychologists had explained that human experience is much richer than can be gathered from a traditional painting that shows a single view from a fixed vantage point. When we look at any given scene, we remember the scene as an overlay of visual impressions seen from different angles and moments in time. Picasso and Braque were familiar with these theories, as indicated by their habit of breaking figures up into multiple overlapping perspectives. The Cubists were also influenced by African art, which they imagined to be more intuitive and closer to nature than intellectualized European art.

Expressionism / Abstract Pioneers

In Germany, an art developed that emphasized emotional responses. [...] Other pioneers of total abstraction were the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) and the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), whose De Stijl canvases, consisting of flat fields of primary color, have become a hallmark of modern art.

A group of artists calling themselves Die Brücke, which included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Emil Nolde (1867–1956), took the brilliant arbitrary colors of the Fauvists and combined them with the intense feelings found in the work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This highly charged attempt to make the inner workings of the mind visible in art is known as Expressionism. Another Expressionist group in Germany, Der Blaue Reiter, was led by the Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), who around 1913 began to paint totally abstract pictures without any pictorial subject.

Modern Art in the U.S. / Armory Show

The next events in our story of the history of art are important because they mark the beginnings of modern art in the United States. [...] Artworks that were to become landmarks of various European art movements were a part of the Armory Show, and they had a profound and lasting effect on American art.

It was these beginnings, coupled with the effects of the First World War, that were partly responsible for the eventual shift of the center of the art world from Paris to New York. While the movements of modern art were sweeping Paris, the American scene remained largely unaffected until 1913. The Armory Show, arranged by the Barnes Foundation and held from February 17 through March 15, 1913, was the first major showing of modern art in the U.S., and it caused a sensation.

Armory Show Reactions

Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907) both shocked viewers with their challenging approaches to the figure and space. [...] Brancusi’s (1876–1957) The Kiss, with its abstracted, block-like figures, and Kandinsky’s non-objective paintings added to the outrage.

Harlem Renaissance

While the effects of the European works in the Armory Show rippled through the American art world, there was also a quintessentially American movement underway. [...] Though the movement lasted only a decade, it was an inspiration to many artists, including Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and other well-known artists of the next generation.

During the 1920s, Harlem became a center for African-American creativity. Fueled by the popularity of jazz, writers and artists joined musicians in a flowering of the arts that is called the Harlem Renaissance.

Dada

During World War I and its aftermath, another movement arose that challenged established ideas about art. [...] Marcel Duchamp created two works that have come to represent this amusing and irreverent view of the world. He added a mustache to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and gave it an insulting title (LHOOQ, 1919), and he also exhibited a common porcelain urinal (Fountain, 1917).

This movement, called Dada, originated among a group of disaffected intellectuals living in Zurich and grew out of the angst of artists who were disillusioned with the war. Dada was an art that aimed to protest against everything in society and to lampoon and ridicule accepted values and norms.

Ready-mades

Duchamp, in fact, invented a new category of artworks that he referred to as ready-mades. [...] For example, in a famous work Picasso took an ordinary object—bicycle handlebars—and made them appear as bull horns when coupled with a bicycle seat (Bull’s Head, 1943).

By taking an ordinary object and giving it a new context, Duchamp would create a work of art. In this way, Duchamp challenged traditional ideas about the way the artist functions—rather than physically making a work of art, an object became a work of art merely through the artist’s choice. Picasso created several works that may also be considered ready-mades.

Surrealism

Some artists, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, attempted to portray the inner workings of the mind in their artworks. [...] This group of artists became known as the Surrealists and included artists such as Salvador Dalí (1904–89), René Magritte (1898–1967), and Joan Miró (1893–1983).