Exam 3 Art in Society

action painting

A process used in creating a non-adjective painting, or by the artist makes gestural movement to produce expressive brush, strokes, drips, and splashes

Contrapposto

A standing position in which the body weights rest on one straight leg with the other leg, relax and bent, giving the torso an S shaped curve

Fauvism

An early 20th century art movement in Europe, led by Henry Matisse That focused on bright colors and patterns. The term comes from the French word fauve meaning while beast.

Genre Painting

Paintings that contains subject matter of every day life

Glyph

A figure or character that has symbolic meaning and is most often carved in relief

Harlem Renaissance

a term that describes the visual arts, music, literature, theater, and dance that emerged in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City between the end of World War I and the Great Depression

Hellenistic

The culture that flourished around Greece, Macedonia, and some areas bordering the Mediterranean sea from around 323 to 31 BCE

installation

involves the configuration of objects in a space to create a unified experience. Installation art can be temporary or permanent, and can be found in galleries, museums, or other public spaces.

Liminality

Liminal space imagery often depicts this sense of "in-between", capturing transitional places (such as stairwells, roads, corridors, or hotels) unsettlingly devoid of people. The aesthetic may convey moods of eeriness, surrealness, nostalgia, or sadness, and elicit responses of both comfort and unease.

Minimalism

is an abstract art movement that originated in the United States in the 1960s:

Neoclassicism

In 18th century, revival of the classical Greek Roman styles and are an architecture as well as style in the European renaissance

Performance

an art form that combines visual art with dramatic performance.

Pointillism

an art movement in Europe in the late 19th century, in which artist applied daubs of pure pigment to a ground to create an image. The paint daubs appear to blend when viewed from a distance.

Pop art

a style of art that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in Britain and the United States that is characterized by its use of imagery from popular culture, consumer goods, and mass media

register

A band that contains imagery or visual motives often several registers are stacked one above the other to convey a narrative sequence

romanesque

A Roman like) An architectural style, and immediately Europe, that contain massive walls, barrels, vaults, and rounded arches. Romanesque churches had cross shape plans.

samurai

In feudal Japan, a member of the warrior class

surrealism

refers to art with a bizarre or fantastic arrangement of images or materials as if tapping into the workings of the unconscious mind.

Imperial palace

the imperial palace

 This alignment signifies the authority of the imperial dynasties. In front of the Forbidden City is Tiananmen Square, a large, important ceremonial space. The Mausoleum of Mao Zedong is deliberately located in the square, on the north-south axis, as the Communist leaders claim to be rightful successors to the emperors.

perseoplis

general view of persia

The Aborigional Memorial

They are memorials to all the native peoples who died as a result of European settlement and were never given proper Aboriginal mortuary rites.

Portrait of Dr. Gachet

Vincent van Gogh painted a free-thinking, eccentric, homeopathic doctor with the foxglove flower to symbolize his profession. With a melancholy face and pose, Gachet leans on two nineteenth-century novels about tragic and degenerate life in Paris. Visual records of inner emotional states.

Fanny (Fingerpainting)

Chuck Close has used the portrait not so much to reveal inner personality as to create an amazingly detailed record of the structure, ridges, pores, and wrinkles of an elderly woman’s head. The scale is enormous. Her head is more than 9 feet high. Her face fills the foreground space of the painting, pushing toward us her lizard-like eyelids, her watery eyes and cracked lips, and the sagging skin of her neck. With this painting, we can stare curiously at a person’s face, an action considered impolite in U.S. culture.

The Study for the Portrait of Okakura Tenshin

painted in 1922, records a face that emphasizes inner character and reveals a shrewd, intelligent individual. Additionally, the portrait mirrors the social, political, and aesthetic controversies in Japan during his time.

Okakura (1862–1913) was a writer, aesthete, educator, and art curator who lived when rulers of Japan were ending three hundred years of isolation and embarking on a period of rapid Westernization. Eastern-influenced music, literature, religion, and medicine were suppressed, and Western modes were introduced.

The one exception was the visual arts, in which traditional and Western styles—and mixtures of the two—flourished. Traditional Japanese paintings and prints were popular and sold well not only in Japan but also in the West.

Self-Portrait with Monkey

painted in 1938, Kahlo’s face is central, studying us as we study her. Her long hair is braided and pulled on top of her head in traditional Mexican style, to show her identification with the peasant culture.

Lush foliage from the Mexican landscape surrounds her head. For Kahlo, the monkey was her animal alter ego. In other self-portraits, Kahlo uses such symbols as hummingbirds, which stood for the souls of dead Mayan warriors, and blood, which alludes to the crippling injuries she suffered in a bus accident, to Mayan bloodletting ceremonies, and to the Christian crown of thorns.

Lacoon and His Sons

the idealized image of Doryphoros, when Greek art turned to depicting humans engaged in violent action, vulnerable to age, injured, diseased, and subject to feelings of pain, terror, or despair. Two cults were particularly influential in this era known as Hellenistic Greece: Stoicism, in which individuals were urged to endure nobly their fate and state in life; and Epicureanism, which advocated intelligent pleasure-seeking in life because death was the end of existence. Both philosophies imply a kind of resigned acceptance of fate and a withdrawal from the Classic Greek ideal of the active, heroic, involved person.

the last judgement

sculpted in the Romanesque style, from the main entrance of the Church of St. Lazare. Unlike the muscular body of Laocoön, here the human bodies are depicted as miserable, frail, and pitifully unattractive.

The scene illustrates the end of time, when every person rises from the ground to be judged forever as worthy of heaven or condemned to hell. In the lower section of this carving, the cowering humans rise from their box-like graves and huddle in line until a pair of large hands, like oversized pliers, clamps around their heads.

All are then plucked up and deposited on the scales of Judgment, where they risk being snatched by demons and stuffed in hell for eternity. The saved souls clutch fearfully at the robes of the angels.

David

dated 1501 to 1504, represents the Israelite youth who fought the giant warrior Goliath, saved his people, and later became the greatest king of the Old Testament. Michelangelo chose the moment that the young David first faces Goliath. Tension is apparent in his frown, tensed muscles, and protruding veins. The sculpture is not self-contained, in contrast to

Doryphoros

the turning figure of David is “completed” by the unseen Goliath. The head and hands are oversized, indicating youthful potential still maturing and a greater potential violence, all attributes that differ from the restrained, relaxed Doryphoros. David’s inner tension speaks of the core of being, the soul, that is separate from the body. The body is ennobled and emphasized, but only as a vehicle for expressing the soul.

Handspring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering, June 26, 1885

a study of the human body in action made by Eadweard Muybridge and subsequently published with other such studies in the book Animal Locomotion. Muybridge invented a special camera shutter and then placed twelve cameras so outfitted in a row. When the athlete performed the handstand, his movements broke the series of strings stretched across his path, thus progressively triggering each of the twelve cameras.

Lucifer

in 1947, the motion of his entire body was very significant. This style of painting is called “gestural abstraction” or action painting. The “action” came from the movement of the artist. The canvas was laid down on the ground, and Pollock poured, dripped, and flung paint upon it as he stood at the edges or walked across the surface. He lunged and swirled about in furious outbursts, which were followed by periods of reflection. His body movements were fixed and recorded in the paint surface, which is a rhythmic mesh of drips, congealed blobs, and looping swirls.

Over vitebsk

dated 1915–1920, Chagall painted a large solitary figure floating over his own village, representing thousands of eastern European Jewish refugees who fled to Russia, displaced by World War I.

In Yiddish, “passing through” is expressed as wandering “over the village,” which Chagall painted literally by means of the “refugee” floating figure in the composition. A sense of being rootless and in a state of upheaval pervades the picture.

The space in the foreground of the picture appears fractured, which Chagall devised from Cubism to represent instability. The colors are from Fauvism

society ladies

photographed in 1927. His subjects were intellectuals, merchants, and writers who demanded full participation for blacks in U.S. politics and culture. The furniture and trappings of comfort surround his well-dressed sitters.

Their poses convey a variety of emotions, including confidence, humor, directness, and dreamy wistfulness. VanDerZee was influenced by movies of the 1920s and 1930s and encouraged sitters to take poses from the films. At times, VanDerZee provided costumes and props that allowed his sitters to expand their personalities.

liberation of Aunt Jemima

illustrates the ways that african american were often depicted in folk art and in commerical imagery

The artifcat Piece

performed in 1986, Native American artist James Luna challenged the way contemporary American culture and museums have presented his race as essentially extinct and vanished. In this performance piece, Luna “installed” himself in an exhibition case in the San Diego Museum of Man in a section on the Kumeyaay Indians, who once inhabited San Diego County.

All around were other exhibition areas with mannequins and props showing the long-lost Kumeyaay way of life. Among them, Luna posed himself, living and breathing, dressed only in a leather cloth. Various personal items were displayed in a glass case, including contemporary ritual objects used currently on the La Jolla reservation where Luna lives, recordings by the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, shoes, political buttons, and other cultural artifacts. Around Luna were labels pointing out his scars from wounds suffered when drunk and fighting. The mixture of elements revealed a living culture.

Maya Palace at Palenque

designed by Kitagawa Utamaro in 1794, is an example of the beautiful woman theme, showing the courtesan Komurasaki. The woman is charming, but human existence is fleeting and transitory;

The colors are exceedingly delicate, with yellow ochres, olive tones, dull reds, grays, and blacks—not blazingly bright. The line quality of the prints was splendid—elegant, fine, curving, and graceful here. The lines in the face and hair are especially refined, while the folds of the drapery are expressed in bold marks and curves.

Geishas and courtesans were depicted in ways that would make them outlets for male desires; the market for these pictures was married men, who would see in these women for hire a fleeting beauty and an erotic perfection that they desired. Especially famous courtesans and geishas would be depicted in popular prints and their images circulated and collected.

Aztec Codex Borbonicus (Fig 10.22)

is a religious calendar that was made during the period of the Spanish conquest, either just before or just after the fall of the Aztec empire. The Codex Borbonicus and the handful of other manuscripts that have survived from this era preserve the pre-Columbian culture.

depicts calendar glyphs surrounding the large image of two gods, Quetzalcoatl (light and sun) and Tezcatlipoca (moon and destruction), who are devouring a man. Many remnants of Aztec culture survive in Central America to the present day.

Leo, 48 inches High, 8 Years Old

At the beginning of the twentieth century, sociologist and artist Lewis Hine photographed miserable labor conditions and slum housing in the United States. Leo, 48 Inches High, 8 Years Old, Picks Up Bobbins at 15¢ a Day, from 1910, shows a young boy who dodges under textile looms to pick up loose thread spools.

Children in these jobs ran the risk of injury or death from moving machinery. They typically worked ten- to twelve-hour shifts in the mills, six days a week, making schooling impossible. Hine fully documented the youthfulness of the child laborers by giving his photos long titles, yet in some ways these titles were unnecessary.

Leo seems very young and apprehensive. The factory is gloomy, littered, and staffed by women, another underpaid group. Hine worked with the National Child Labor Committee, a private group dedicated to protecting working children, and the loosely organized Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century, which sought reform for many problems resulting from urbanization and industrialization. Child labor was eventually outlawed in the 1930s.

MetroMobilitan

Hans Haacke was advocating for native Africans in South Africa who were politically and economically repressed under apartheid, a system of legal racial separation. In the 1980s, many nations, including the United States, denounced apartheid. However, some corporations profited from apartheid enforcement, including U.S.-based Mobil Oil, which sold supplies to the South African police and military.

To counter negative publicity, Mobil provided major financial backing to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City to mount a blockbuster exhibition entitled “Treasures of Ancient Nigeria.”MetroMobiltan raises awareness of the often-hidden ways that one country’s culture and economy can profit from an unjust situation halfway around the world. The three silk banners indicate Mobil’s policies.

Hidden behind is a black-and-white photomural of a funeral procession for black South Africans shot by police. MetroMobiltan links the museum, the oil company, and apartheid, but the layering shows that people might be unknowingly involved in an oppressive situation that they condemn.

Sun Mad

dated 1981, Ester Hernandez takes familiar imagery from popular, commercial culture and subverts it. For decades, the raisin growers around Hernandez’s hometown heavily used insecticides that contaminated the groundwater the local population used for drinking and bathing.

Hernandez took the packaging of the best-known raisin producer, Sun Maid, and changed the usual image of healthy eating into a message of death. Her grimly humorous work is effective because the raisin industry advertising is so successful and we know the original image.

Hernandez chose an art form that allows her to reach many people, just as advertising does. This work is a color screen print that has been reproduced and widely disseminated on T-shirts and postcards. Even though Hernandez was reacting to a specific instance of contamination, her work reaches out to everyone who ingests pesticide residue or to farm workers who were sprayed with pesticides while working in the fields.

Oath of the Horatii

painted in 1784, Jacques-Louis David represents a scene from the early history of ancient Rome, in which three brothers vow to represent the Roman army in a fight to the death against three representatives of an opposing army. Their father hands them their swords, reminding them of the manly virtues of courage and patriotism, while their sisters and wives swoon at the right, in dread and sorrow at the anticipated killing (one of the sisters was to marry a representative of the opposing army).

Heroic actions are a mark of masculinity, reinforced by the women’s passivity. In a moment of male bonding, forged in the face of danger, the three brothers become a single force, a part of each other, and each is willing to die for the others and for an external cause. There are other gender indicators. The images both reflect the “reality” of gender roles and create that “reality.” They spring to some extent from existing social conditions, but they also entrench those conditions and make them seem natural, not just social conventions.

Trauma

dated 1989, the woman at the center publicly shows her bound feet. Although bound feet were considered erotic in private, public exposure was a shameful act. Below her is an image of a dead Chinese student, killed by Chinese government forces when they violently crushed the demonstrations for freedom in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.

Liu sees the killings in Tiananmen Square as a shameful event for China. Behind the woman’s head, the outline map of China is upside down, whereas its reflection below, cut out of red felt, becomes a bloodstain on the floor below the student. The bowl on the floor is a vessel often emptied and filled—but never in exactly the same way.

Poetically, the empty bowl represents China and the artist herself, emptied and then refilled by the cycles of history. Because of their long history, the Chinese commonly make associations between contemporary events and events of the distant past, a habit of thought that is evident in Liu’s work.

Las Meninas

painted by Diego Velazquez in 1656. The title means “Maids of Honor,” which by itself marks the upper class. At the center of the composition is the blond Infanta Margarita, the daughter of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain, the focus of considerable attention and energy. This informal image was meant not for public display but for the king’s private office. Although the Infanta is not painted in a throne room or with a crown, we can understand her exalted position through many elements in the painting.

The space of the painting is majestic: light floods the foreground; the room is grand; the deep space extends back in the distance. The space is also made complex by mirrors. One we see, but the other we cannot, although its presence is implied by the fact that Velazquez peers outward, presumably into a mirror, to paint himself. Velazquez is the standing figure at the left of the painting, working on a large canvas, perhaps this very picture.

Size is important. This painting is 10½ feet by 9 feet. A physical object this large is a sign of rank and a mark of distinction, as is owning, possessing, or commissioning such an artwork. Diego Velazquez was a celebrated and famous artist. His prestige is an important addition to the royal commissions.

Great Beaded Crown of the Orangun-Ila

the Great Beaded Crown of the Orangun-Ila, from the Yoruba people of Nigeria. The image shows not only the crown but also the robe and staff that are signs of rank. Crowns such as this one are worn by high-ranking territorial chiefs and are similar to the headgear worn by priests and the supreme ruler. Rank is made apparent through dress in a number of ways:

(1) the shape of the clothing or headgear, (2) the materials used, and (3) the meaning of the decorative symbols. The conical shape of the crown is a highly significant Yoruba symbol.

It represents the inner self, which, in the case of those of rank, is connected with the spirit world. The cone shape is repeated in the umbrella that protects the chief from the sun and in the peaked-roofed verandas where he sits while functioning as the ruler.

Kitchen Maid

painted by Jan Vermeer in 1660, showing a maid in a modest home in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century. In this painting, the working class is elevated in dignity. The mundane tasks of pouring milk and arranging bread seem almost sacred.

The gentle light bathes, outlines, and gives a strong sense of the physical presence of a humble woman, an image with such simplicity and directness that she almost personifies virtue. Her work seems healthy and life sustaining.

The woven basket, the crust of the bread, the earthen jug, and the texture of the wall seem glowing and burnished with age. The color harmonies of cream, gold, and rust are earthen versions of the strong primary colors of red and yellow.

La Grande Jatt

Georges Seurat’s La Grande Jatte dated 1884–1886, is a park scene. In an era of increasing industrialization, the very creation of parks was the result of the affluent middle class’s desire to reintroduce nature into increasingly crowded cities.

The painting shows a collection of strangers outdoors on a modern holiday. The figures are proper, composed, and orderly. Details of middle-class. The woman in the right foreground holds a monkey on a leash, and the similarity between the monkey’s curved back and the bustle on her dress shows an awareness of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and the resulting social Darwinism, which placed women closer on a continuum to the rest of nature than men were placed

Uji Bridge

from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, is a large screen more than 5 feet tall. The bridge arcs across the top of the screen, partly obscured by mists. In the foreground, the river rolls past a water wheel. Dramatic willow branches contrast with budding leaves. The dark branches stand in stark contrast to the golds and reds of the background.

The painting expresses qualities of simplicity and beauty, perishable with the passing of the moment. The gold leaf background reflected light in the dim castle interior. The artwork of the middle class was often the ukiyo-e print. These prints were modest in size and produced in large numbers, so that the cost of each was within the reach of the middle-class merchant.

They were kept in drawers and, therefore, did not require a castle to house them. The ukiyo-e prints were eclectic in style, combining Japanese, Chinese, and, later, Western styles. Because they were inexpensive to produce, the artist who drew the original design was able to be innovative. For lavish screens like the Uji Bridge, artists had much less latitude in the designs they produced.