History of Contemporary Art Flashcards

Flashcards with vocabulary terms and definitions from lecture notes on the History of Contemporary Art.

Funeral at Ornans

A monumental oil painting by Gustave Courbet that uses dimensions typically reserved for important figures to celebrate daily life, challenging traditional artistic norms.

Olympia

An Edouard Manet painting depicting a reclining nude woman that shocked the public with its frank portrayal of female nudity and direct gaze, challenging traditional depictions and contributing to Impressionism.

Youth and Love

A William Bouguereau neoclassical work known for meticulous realism and idealized beauty of the human form, exemplifying academic art in France.

Post-Impressionism

An artistic movement where artists wanted to go beyond simply capturing reality, exploring the science of color or capturing timelessness and the permanent structure of reality.

The Forest in Winter at Sunset

An oil painting by Théodore Rousseau, a key figure in the Barbizon School, expressing deep admiration for nature and portraying a forest at sunset in muted tones, against academic tradition.

Island of the Grand Jatte

Alfred Sisley's landscape painting capturing light and atmosphere, reflecting the Impressionist movement’s goal of representing the natural world with immediate, fleeting qualities.

The Regatta at Argenteuil

A quintessential Claude Monet painting of boating and leisure along the Seine River, using color and brushstroke technique to emphasize the ephemeral quality of light and water, exemplifying Impressionism.

Haystack Series

A series of paintings by Claude Monet featuring haystacks as a subject to explore the effects of light and weather, demonstrating innovative technique against traditional notions of scene representation.

Le Bain de Seine

A large-scale pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, using small dots of color to achieve a harmonious effect, contrasting traditional brushwork and creating a relaxed structure.

Mont Saint-Victoire

Paul Cézanne's landscape paintings focusing on structural elements and breaking down nature into geometric forms, pivotal in the development of modern art and Cubism.

Cubism

An art movement characterized by a break in the bond between nature and art, using the brain rather than the eye to capture the Real, employing poliperspective instead of traditional perspective.

Bottle of Suze

A collage and work of Synthetic Cubism by Pablo Picasso, incorporating real elements like newspaper clippings and challenging traditional representation with layered surfaces.

Man with a Guitar

A key work in Cubism by Georges Braque, dissecting space and fracturing forms to challenge traditional perspectives.

Burial of Phocion

Classical history painting by Nicolas Poussin, illustrating the Roman story of Phocion's burial with clarity, idealized forms, and balanced rhythm, exploring moral and philosophical subjects.

Young Women at the Seaside

A symbolist piece by Pierre Puvis de Chevannes with a serene and tranquil atmosphere, evoking themes of nature, solitude, and meditation.

The Potato Eaters

Vincent van Gogh painting with a dark and earthy palette highlighting familiar unity and focusing on the humble, hard lives of rural workers with emotional intensity.

Vision after the Sermon

Paul Gauguin's Symbolist painting with a Biblical scene set against a bold, flat landscape, exploring color and the spiritual in art.

Io Orana Maria

Paul Gauguin's Tahitian work reflecting his immersion in indigenous culture and spirituality, blending religious and cultural elements in a balanced composition.

The Red Studio

Henri Matisse's painting with a vivid red color and abstract, disorienting effect, challenging traditional perspective and naturalism.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté

Henri Matisse's pioneering work of Fauvism, characterized by bold, non-naturalistic colors conveying sensual pleasure and themes of luxury and calm.

Staberhof Farm on Fehmarn I

German Expressionist painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner depicting the raw emotion of the rural landscape through distorted figures and intense color.

Strassenbildern

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner work depicting urban scenes and the psychological impact of modern city life with distorted forms and jarring colors.

Cover of Der Blue Reiter Almanac

A publication reflecting the ideas of the Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, celebrating abstraction and the connection between art and spirituality.

Dadaism

An art movement that exasperated avant-garde premises and rejected ratio in favor of random, case, contradiction, disjointness, paradox, ambiguousness and illogicality to address incongruence of the world.

Incuneandosi nell'abitato

Tullio Crali's Futurist painting showing a dynamic, streamlined view of urban life with a focus on speed and modernity, reflecting the energy of industrial progress and movement.

Piazze d’Italia

Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting featuring eerie, empty piazzas that create a sense of mystery, melancholy, and critical reading of contemporary man.

Hugo Ball

A key figure in the Dada movement whose performances at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich were central to the birth of Dada.

Bauhaus, Dessau

A photograph that exemplifies the Bauhaus movement’s focus on industrial design and modernist aesthetics, emphasizing clarity, function, and geometric abstraction.

Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum

Hannah Höch's photomontage critiques the colonial and ethnographic representation of indigenous peoples through manipulation of photographic images.

Abstractism

When figuration gets ignored and invisible is proposed, using shape and color to veicolate human interiority.

Impression III

A key work in the development of abstract art by Kandinsky that evokes musical rhythms and emotions through color and form, conveying subjective experience rather than representational reality.

Composition 8

Kandinsky painting of geometric abstraction that uses sharp lines, colors, and forms to create a sense of order and balance.

Composition 1 with Red, Black, Blue, and Yellow

Mondrian's geometric abstraction and neoplasticism style using lines and primary colors to search for a universal aesthetic of harmony and order.

Ocean

Piet Mondrian's abstraction reflecting his transition from a more representational style to his iconic grid-based, non-representational work, connected to nature but in an abstract way.

Broadway Boogie Woogie

Mondrian's dynamic painting inspired by the streets and energy of New York City, using blocks of primary colors to evoke the rhythms of jazz music and urban life.

Cow and Fiddle

Kasimir Malevich's gouache on paper capturing the Futurist fascination with movement and dynamism, employing simplified shapes and symbolic significance.

Black Square

Manifesto of Suprematism movement focused on basic geometric shapes to express universal concepts of pure feeling and spiritual experience!

Olympia

A reimagining of Olympia theme by Jean Dubuffet, using rough textures and a primitive style to convey raw, visceral energy.

Portrait of Pope Innocent X

Francis Bacon’s emotional reworking of Velázquez's classic portrait distorting the pope’s figure within a cage-like space, reflecting themes of isolation and existential despair.

Boogie Woogie a Roma

Renato Gottuso's painting, influenced by American culture, that captures a vibrant, musical scene with movement and dynamism that reflects modern life and freedom.

Sacco

Alberto Burri's work using unconventional materials like jute sacks to symbolize suffering and the human cost of war, existing between painting and sculpture.

One: Number 31

Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism emphasizing the physical act of creation with no recognizable subject, reflecting freedom and the unconscious mind.

Abstraction

De Kooning's Abstract Expressionism exploring the relationship between unconscious and artistic process with energetic brushstrokes, bold color, and textural depth.

Mahoning

Franz Kline's dramatic work of Abstract Expressionism using bold black strokes over a white background to emphasize the physical act of painting and spontaneous approach.

Untitled

Mark Rothko's color field paintings that evoke emotion through simple, large blocks of color, creating an experience of silence and loneliness.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis

Barnett Newman's painting of fields of color and a single vertical line to convey a sense of the sublime, aiming to evoke an emotional experience beyond representation.

Monogram

Robert Rauschenberg's assemblage combining painting and found objects, questioning traditional art and critiquing materialism and consumerism.

Female Figure

Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil's collaboration using mixed media to create an abstract figure, reflecting ephemerality and reconstruction.

Flag

Jasper Johns' iconic work using encaustic painting to create a textured version of the American flag, questioning the symbols and meanings of national identity.

Minimalism

Art movement in which precise and essential geometric forms are carefully aligned without symbolic or narrative content.

Untitled [Wall]

Donald Judd's modular art arrangement with precise and essential geometric forms that interacts with the surrounding architecture.

L Beams

Robert Morris's simple geometric L shaped forms made form industrial materials, like plywood and steel, that can be rearranged to focus on the object itself

Land Art

An art movement in which natural materials meet urban environment.

The New York Earth Room

Walter De Maria's land art piece with 250 cubic yards of soil, creating a contrast between the city frenesìa and the installation permanence for sensory experience.

A Line Made by Walking

Richard Long's work of land art created by walking back and forth in a straight line across a field in England, flattening the grass to form a visible line

Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson's land art built from basalt rocks, earth and salt crystal, to express a cosmic and geological time.

Double Negative

Michael Heizer's work of land art excavating 240,000 tons of rock to create two opposite sides of a canyon, exploring tension between destruction and creation

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor

Frank Stella's work of precise geometry and black stripes alternating with thin lines that emphasizes form, materiality and process

The Store

Claes Oldenburg's installation transformed shop full of objects carved in soft materials into objects of art for consumerism critique.

Campbell’s Soup Cans

Andrew Warhol's work that takes a daily consumer product and brings it to the world of art to explore the post-WWII consumer boom.

Arte Povera

Greek-Italian artist that explores the use of material and the relationship between art and space.

Untitled

Jannis Kounellis's minimalist composition that quest for a total sensory experience.

Armi Series

Pino Pascali's large scale sculptures combination that combines playfulness, irony and industrial materials.

Crescerà tranne che in quel punto

Giuseppe Penone's piece that emphasize relationship, transformation and memory between nature and human intervention.

Sculture Viventi

Piero Manzoni’s performance that questions authorship, materiality and the role of artist by signing people.

Pangolé cape

Helio Oiticica’s sculpture that challenges notions of static art, shifting the emphasis on the physical interaction of the artist with the work

Contingent

Eva Hesse's piece that explores the use of non-traditional materials such as rubber and latex to create flexible sculptural forms for performance.

Poesia all’Albero

Mirella Bentivoglio's intesection of text and image that express a relationship between nature and art.

Self-Portrait as a Fountain

Bruce Nauman’s simple yet playful photo that expresses his body being both subject and medium to turn his bodily function into an artistic gesture.

Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful

Marina Abramović’s provocative work of art that challenges the conventional notion of beauty and focuses on authenticity and intensity

Sentimental Action

Gina Pane’s piece that uses pain as communication to reject beauty in favour of raw, visceral experience.

Fluid Happening

Allan Kaprow’s piece that invites the public to participate actively in the work, breaking down traditional barriers between spectator and artist

Semiotics of the Kitchen

Martha Rosler’s video art showing alienation performing exaggerated movements with function utensils for a symbol of gender roles.

House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home

Socially engaged art was created during vietnam war to express vs consumer culture and militarism by photomontages combining war images and domestic scenes.

Berthe Morisot and Me

Feminist art of mixed-media collage that creates a dialogue between two artists about marginalisation of women in art.

The Dinner Party

Feminist art for gender equality with a monumental installation of a triangular table with ceramic plates to express female power .

Poster

Feminist art with female gorillas anonymous feminist group that uses sarcasm, humor to critique gender inequality at museums .

Untitled [96]

Contemporary art that portrays herself in a dramatic, staged role, wearing elaborate costumes and makeup to transform and challenge the conventional femininity.

Flood

Expressing flood’s global crises through multimedia installation, sound, and interactive elements where it brings about the literal and metaphorical.

Legarsi alla Montagna

A community-driven act of unity and resilience piece of art where symbolises a connection between people and nature

7000 Oaks

Enviromental art that represents reparation through oak trees as symbols of strength, resilience and growth

Theatre of Oppressed

An innovative method of social change where the audience participates towards social justice and resistance.

Divisor

Pape's Divisor invites the audience to enter a shared white fabric, fostering community by challenging individual solitude.

Meat Joy

Schneemann's Meat Joy explores sexuality and confronts social taboos through primal movements with raw materials.

Eye/Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera

Schneemann's Eye/Body subverts objectification, portraying an active, self-exploring female figure viewed through the camera's lens.